Analogies - new setting: 20%
The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sort of low effort post, we can all recognize right? Read the book series. Battle with a culture different than your own. The absolute depression by the third book helps you experience this more than this bullshit Cliff’s notes. Spend a few hours. Jesus.
Are you expecting people will 'just' read the three books to get the context of "dark forest" and then come back to this post after that?
Yes. If they want to understand the author they should spend time with the author (via the books).
I didn’t draw the original premise. I just pointed out that they didn’t understand the Dark Forest. At all.
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#23For anyone not familiar with the concept of "dark forest": > […] In Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, the author proposes a literary explanation for the Fermi paradox in which countless alien civilizations exist, but are both silent and paranoid, destroying any nascent lifeforms loud enough to make themselves known.[181] This is because any other intelligent life may represent a future threat. As a result, Liu'…
Here's a PBS Space Time episode [1], "Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?", that takes a look at this from a game theory point of view
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#24Not quite. Cixin Liu’s series had a premise of dramatic asymmetry. AI in our context is the inverse. Everyone can spend “credits” to get a supergenius coder.
There are still a major asymmetries. There is an economic asymmetry between having a frontier model that people pay to use vs. being someone paying them so they can keep improving it. Also, from the outside, we only know about the advances that get shipped/put on servers. Presumably, a lot more promising advances are uncovered than are shipped. Maybe they don't fit the product, maybe they are not ready, or maybe they…
Yep. I agree. I’m assuming that the best model for coding is always six months advanced ahead for the investors. Even with that assumption, there’s a huge democratization effect.
I’ve never seen a tool more accessible for people of all backgrounds and abilities. It should be celebrated. And yet “engineers” are worried about their identities.
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sort of low effort post, we can all recognize right? Read the book series. Battle with a culture different than your own. The absolute depression by the third book helps you experience this more than this bullshit Cliff’s notes. Spend a few hours. Jesus.
Are you expecting people will 'just' read the three books to get the context of "dark forest" and then come back to this post after that?
[dead]
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#26The “dark forest” vibe feels real, but it’s less sci‑fi and more boring economics: scraping is cheap, attribution is hard, and trust is fragile. I worry the default outcome is everything drifting toward logins/CAPTCHAs/walled gardens—not because people want that, but because “public + unmetered” turns into “free training data + abuse surface.” Feels like we need better primitives for proof-of-origin (signing/publisher identity) and some kind of tiered access for bulk crawling. Anyone seen a non-centralized approach that could actually get adoption?
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#27For anyone not familiar with the concept of "dark forest": > […] In Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, the author proposes a literary explanation for the Fermi paradox in which countless alien civilizations exist, but are both silent and paranoid, destroying any nascent lifeforms loud enough to make themselves known.[181] This is because any other intelligent life may represent a future threat. As a result, Liu'…
All the quotes miss the simplicity of 3 rules of Cosmology or whatever it was called in the trilogy. — The essence of the Dark Forest theory: 1. Survival is the primary goal of any civilization. 2. Life expands to fill all available space, but resources are finite. Roughly speaking, like humans cutting down forests to expand cities without caring what happens to the ants living there — if expansion is needed, it’s do…
#2 doesn't seem to consider how much stuff there is out there. Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places?
Furthermore, while we may not care about "ants", we do - at least to some degree - care about the impact on wildlife and the environment. Probably not as much as we should, but our concern has only grown over time, so I'm not sure I buy the suggestion that a super-advanced civilization would go the extreme opposite way and not care about the impact it has on "lesser" life forms.
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the quotes miss the simplicity of 3 rules of Cosmology or whatever it was called in the trilogy. — The essence of the Dark Forest theory: 1. Survival is the primary goal of any civilization. 2. Life expands to fill all available space, but resources are finite. Roughly speaking, like humans cutting down forests to expand cities without caring what happens to the ants living there — if expansion is needed, it’s do…
#2 doesn't seem to consider how much stuff there is out there. Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places? Furthermore, while we may not care about "ants", we do - at least to some degree - care about the impact on wildlife and the environment. Probably not as much as we should, but our concern has only grown over time, so I'm not…
I mean we could be just like rodents to them, I won't think people care about uprooting rodents
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
#2 doesn't seem to consider how much stuff there is out there. Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places? Furthermore, while we may not care about "ants", we do - at least to some degree - care about the impact on wildlife and the environment. Probably not as much as we should, but our concern has only grown over time, so I'm not…
I mean we could be just like rodents to them, I won't think people care about uprooting rodents
Maybe, but to me, it would be as if we dug into a prairie dog's tunnels, killed them all and stole whatever little bits of food they have. It just doesn't make sense.
Re: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean we could be just like rodents to them, I won't think people care about uprooting rodents
Maybe, but to me, it would be as if we dug into a prairie dog's tunnels, killed them all and stole whatever little bits of food they have. It just doesn't make sense.
So how is it that the amazon is disappearing? Coincidence or human interference?
Humans have demonstrated a cycle of 1. exploitation to the point destruction, 2. Realisation of the damage they have inflicted, 3. Green washing and band-aid fixes 4. Rinse and repeat.
Be it waste handling, colonisation, industrial revolution, slavery, oil extraction etc etc.
At least for the time being, prairie dog tunnels seem safe.