Moloch whose name is the Mind

Moloch is an ancient Canaanite god. In the Hebrew Bible, he is portrayed as a powerful pagan demon demanding childhood sacrifices. More generally, Moloch has become the symbol of an entity requiring immense sacrifice.

A brilliant essay by Scott Alexander examines an excerpt from Allen Ginsberg's famous poem Howl depicting Moloch. The essay goes on to conceptualise Moloch as an immaterial entity that sits on top of many multi-agent interactions, propelling a race to the bottom. While no involved parties desire a given outcome, the perversion of competition makes people sacrifice objective goods to the ruthless, humanless, and insatiable Moloch.

All I can urge you is to read the essay, which is powerful and insightful.

To just illustrate with the familiar example of scientific research and publishing, here is a highly over-simplified but representative scenario. While many groups engage in sub-optimal practices, for example imprecise or even fraudulent use of statistics or biologically irrelevant experiments producing quick results, all are in a race to publish their papers. On this depends their status, their funding, their future career. No one wants to deliberately produce bad science. But no one can afford to take the extra time and care that it would take them to do so, else they are outpaced in the competition.

A ratchet like mechanism goes on where some poor practices may become more and more prevalent. This increments everyone down to a state where they are the same relative to other groups, but everyone is overall worst off, given that a specific good research practice has been lost and no group is ready to incur the fitness cost of re-implementing it. An objective good has irreversibly been lost. For it to be restored, an external, omniscient and omnipotent entity would have to level the whole system up again, but this rarely exists in real world scenarios.

I have been very moved by this essay over the past few weeks, and come to consider cases in which a Moloch-like mechanism is at play. This is not all my original thought of course, and Max Tegmark formalising the race to AGI as a Moloch-like race was a big contributor to spurring my thought. Liv Boeree also speaks at length and eloquently about this topic.

Please do read the essay. I will leave you with Ginsberg's striking poem, pointing salient parts.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!