For Marx, capitalism was Moloch, and communism was a solution.
For Unabomber, the method to stop Moloch was the destruction of complex technological society and all complex coordination problems.
Maybe, let's generalize this a bit... let's call these types of solutions:
Singleton solutions -- there will be no coordination problems if everything is ruled by one royal dynasty / one political party / one recursively self-improving artificial intelligence.
Typical problems:
Requires absolute power; not sure if we can get there without sacrificing everything to Moloch during the wars between competing royal dynasties / political systems / artificial intelligencies.
Does not answer how the singleton makes decisions internally: royal succession prob...
These are interesting parallels (maybe? The unabomber parallel seems odd but I don’t actually know enough about him to critique it properly) But they don’t seem to answer my question. If there is an answer being implied, please spell it out more explicitly. Otherwise maybe this belongs as a comment, not an answer?
RadicalxChange is a movement that grew out of a book called Radical Markets, which proposes mechanism changes we could use to fund public goods (which would take a large bite out of the Moloch issue). Can recommend the book and or the 80,000 hours episode with Glen Weyl as an intro.
Other promising options I've seen but not looked into in as much depth
Generally speaking one might lump these approaches into "Anti Moloch memetic warfare" which in a way was what Scott was doing. Spreading memes that identify Moloch as an issue and proposing different ways of self organising to the network.
There's the Game B discourse around creating social norms that defeat moloch.
This answer is interesting, but underspecified for somebody who’s never heard of this. What is Game B? Where is it? Google just returns a bunch of board game links.
edit: Ah, finally got to https://www.gameb.wiki/
There aren't many other plausible technological options for things that could defeat moloch.
A sufficiently smart and benevolent team of uploaded humans could possibly act as a singleton, in the scenario that one team get mind uploading first, and that the hardware is enough to run uploads really fast.
What I would actually expect in this scenario is a short period of uploads doing AI research followed by a Foom.
But if we suppose that FAI is really difficult, and that the uploads know about this, and about moloch, then they could largely squash moloch at least for a while.
(I am unsure whether or not some subtle moloch like process would sneak back in, but at least the blatently molochy processes would be gone for a while.)
For example, if each copy of a person has any control over which copy is duplicated when more people are needed, then most of the population will have had life experiences that make them want to get copied a lot.
There aren't many other plausible technological options for things that could defeat moloch.
Why? What about non-technological solutions?
Moloch appears at any point when multiple agents have similar levels of power and different goals. Any time you have multiple agents with similar levels of capability and different utility functions, a form of moloch appears.
With current tech, it would be very hard to give total power to one human. The power would have to be borrowed, in the sense that their power is in setting a Nash equilibria as a shelling point. "Everyone do X and kill anyone who breaks this rule" is a nash equilibria, if everyone else is doing it, you better too. The dictator sets the shelling point by choice of X. The dictator is forced to quash any rebels or loose power. Another moloch.
Given that we have limited control over the preferences of new humans, there is likely to be some differences in utility functions between humans. Humans can die, go mad ect. You need to be able to transfer power to a new human, without having any adverse selection pressure in the choice of which.
One face of moloch is evolution. To stop it, you need to be reseting the gene pool with fresh DNA from long term storage, otherwise, over time the population genome might drift in a direction you don't like.
We might be able to keep Moloch at a reasonably low damage level, just a sliver of moloch making things not quite as nice as they could be. At least if people know Moloch go out of their way to destroy it.
If we assume that super-intelligent AI is a thing, you have to engineer a global social system thats stable over milllions of years and where no one makes ASI in that time.
Well this requirement doesn't appear to be particularly stringent compared to the ability to suppress overpopulation and other dysgenic pressures that would be necessary for such a global social system. It would have to be totalitarian anyway (though not necessarily centralized).
It is also a useful question to ask whether there are alternative existential opportunities if super-intelligent AI doesn't turn out to be a thing. What makes the FAI problem unique isn't that it's an existential threat - there are plenty of those to go around - but that it's also an existential opportunity. The only one we know of thus far.
really can't help because I happen to think Moloch isn't only inevitable but positively good (and not only better than alternatives but actually the best possible world type of good)
Meditations on Moloch lays out a rather pessimistic view of the future, and then offers a super-intelligent AI "gardener" as the solution. A lot of the rationalist community is focused on AI, which makes sense in that light (and of course because of the existential risk of unaligned AI), but I don't know of any projects focused on non-AI solutions to countering or defeating Moloch. Some projects exist to counter specific local coordination problems, but apparently none to counter the global gardening problem in the original post? Am I missing such a project? Is there a reason that AI is the only plausible solution? Is this low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked?
edited to add some clarifications: