The Less Interesting TimesDon't Panic

“Moloch is the personification of the forces that coerce competing individuals to take actions which, although locally optimal, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off. Moreover, no individual is able to unilaterally break out of the dynamic. The situation is a bad Nash equilibrium. A trap.”
– Scott Alexander

Basically, Moloch causes the Tragedy of the Commons on a massive, nearly unstoppable, irreversible, inescapable scale.

Today, it is incentivised by the people at the top of any organisation, the ones who actually steer the particular boat, focusing too narrowly only on the factors that control the preferred value they prescribe to in the short term. In cooperatives like Motion Twin, their value is what they make of it and the people controlling it are the players they make games for. And as game makers mostly wanting to live well enough and make more games, they think a lot more about sustainability. In giant public corporations, their value is only their market capitalisation and the people controlling it are the shareholders who just want to see the line go up every quarter. That’s how you get Broken Capitalism, or Enshittification.

People stay in Moloch Traps because they think the way they got there is either the best engineered way we have or the most natural and they don’t bother to think about better ways. The actual experts on the field can think of better ways but they usually lack the power to make any meaningful change, to force every boat to steer back into a better future. And the people with power to force an entire ecosystem to change don’t listen to them because they too can only see until the next election.

Robots and industrialisation are replacing human jobs. It’s ok but it should be controlled for and compensated for. Right now, we’re making mechanical workers redundant, but if we assume continued unlimited advancement, AI will eventually replace everything we give it to, maybe make the entire human race redundant. This will have to be a welfare state or it’s literally eliminating “people”. I’m not saying it’s imminent but it’s not that hard to see the possibility of it happening and that we should consider and prepare for it.