The Cognitive Dark Forest
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The Cognitive Dark Forest
1–10 of 301 posts
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#2The LLMisms in the "thinkpad" section caused me to close the tab
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#3Dark forest makes no sense to me. Why would a civilization eradicate another, spending huge amounts of resources (time, energy, material) when the universe has such an enormous scale that you cannot even get to each other in a timescale that makes much sense...
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#4The thesis that in the past it was safe to share ideas and projects because the execution was hard, and that now things have changed because of AI is an interesting AI, but I wonder if it is really true.
It certainly seems true that for small projects and relatively narrow scoped things that AI can replicate them easily. I'm thinking specifically about blog posts where people share their first steps and simple programs as they learn something new, like "here is how I set up a flask website", "here is how I trained a neural network on MNIST".
But if AI is empowering people to take on more complex projects, perhaps it takes the same amount of time to replicate the execution of a more advanced project?
In other words, maybe in the past, it would take me 10 hours to do a "small" project, which today I could do in 1 hour with the assistance of AI.
And now, with the assistance of AI, I can go much farther in 10 hours and deliver a more complex project. But that means that someone else trying to replicate this execution is still going to need around 10 hours to replicate it.
Basically, I'm agreeing that AI can reduce barrier to replicating the execution of another person's project, but at the same time, that we can make more complex projects that are harder to replicate. So a basic SASS crud app is trivial now but a multi-disciplinary domain specific app that integrates multiple systems is still going to be hard to replicate.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#5>You are creating your cool streaming platform in your bedroom. Nobody is stopping you, but if you succeed, if you get the signal out, if you are being noticed, the large platform with loads of cash can incorporate your specific innovations simply by throwing compute and capital at the problem. They can generate a variation of your innovation every few days, eventually they will be able to absorb your uniqueness. It’s just cash, and they have more of it than you.
That's not exactly a new phenomenon and doesn't require AI. If anything that was worse in the 90s with Microsoft starving out pretty much any would-be competitor they could find.
And it wasn't just Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#6Dark forest makes no sense to me. Why would a civilization eradicate another, spending huge amounts of resources (time, energy, material) when the universe has such an enormous scale that you cannot even get to each other in a timescale that makes much sense...
Makes some sense to me, as the prisoner's dilemma dictates at least some fraction will try to kill you. So you've got to go first.
Reminds me of the Dan Carlin take on aircraft carriers in World War II: if you in a carrier spotted an opposing carrier and didn't send everything you had before it spotted you, you were dead. The only move was to go all in every time.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#7Honestly my hope is the arbitrage that allowed big tech to make the kind of margins it does on software starts to go away because it’s sooo cheap to build software. In other words, defending the technical moats that we rely on today doesn’t make sense in the future because it’s not a reliable way to make money. Aka no need to protect your technical secrets because there’s no capitalist reason to lol. Taken further, my naive hope is societal attention moves away from this layer and onto whatever becomes the new way to make money and the people left paying attention to software are big on sharing
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#8[dead]
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#9Dark forest makes no sense to me. Why would a civilization eradicate another, spending huge amounts of resources (time, energy, material) when the universe has such an enormous scale that you cannot even get to each other in a timescale that makes much sense...
The dark forest is conditional on that it does not require huge amounts of resources to eradicate another civilization and that (over time) the universe turns out not to be of a scale enormous enough (and in the book there are agents working to actively make it smaller).
Bringing it back to the dark forest of idea space, it is an interesting question whether the the space of feasibly executable ideas being small (as this essay assumes) is inherently true, or more of a function of our inability to navigate/travel it very well.
If the former, then yes it probably is/will be a dark forest. If the latter, then I would think the jury is still out.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#10The LLMisms in the "thinkpad" section caused me to close the tab
Yep, time to flag.