Might just be independent discovery, but the main idea of this blog post is more or less the exact theory advanced in the recent book "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" by Bogna Konior ( https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Theory-Internet-Redux/dp/... ).
The Cognitive Dark Forest
31–40 of 301 posts
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#32Dark 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...
Are you asking about the 3 body problem version of this? Spoiler alert: The folks doing the eradicating aren't spending much time/energy/anything on eradicating. It's one large missile through space. I think the gist is: sure, we humans can't conceive of getting to anyone else in the universe in any timescale, but if we can keep ourselves from destroying ourselves, we'll eventually figure it out. And we'll spread. An…
I don't think it's correct that we destroyed everything that isn't us. If we take all living beings, we have destroyed only a small percentage.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#33The 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 progra…
Sure but the Forest point stands, whatever you can hide from the Forest becomes something that slows it down and allows you some, even if only brief, moat?
There’s a deeply flawed hidden assumption here, which is that the individual in question is the only possible source for the relevant information that the AI can harvest. In the real world that absurdly rare, original thought is rare because we’re in the mix with billions of others.
Scientists who hold back publishing breakthroughs have not guaranteed that they will be the sole discoverer, just that someone else will inevitably be credited when they reach the same conclusions.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#34The LLMisms in the "thinkpad" section caused me to close the tab
What LLMisms?
No W. No X. No Y. Just Z.
In fact, the whole article is filled with slopisms, just with the em dashes swapped for regular dashes and some improper spacing around ellipses to make you think a human wrote it.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#35The view here shows big huge powers of technocapital consuming all else, stealing every idea. My hope is the opposite. Integrative, resonant computing ( https://resonantcomputing.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659456 although I have some qualms with it's focus on privacy), with open social protocols baked in seems like maybe possibly can eat some of the vicious consumptive technocapital. In a way that ca…
I hope the open source models / crowdsourced approaches to training will also be an important part of the ecosystem, keeping it honest and providing an exit. Similarly, as it does for operating systems and other important software.
But I don't see a trend of big companies really opening up. They usually open only if it benefits them (which can also happen and did happen in various scenarios). Everybody is accepting and open when it's trying to grow and is closing once it can reach a monopoly.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#36Dark 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...
Agree, is a fiction based in accepting the premise of zero-sum game.
It denies that more advanced civilizations might have better models of the universe where they know this isn't an issue and we're just stupid teenagers in the neighborhood playing dangerous games and merely taking a look every now and then to see if we prove we will survive ourselves.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#37Thanks, this helped crystallize something for me: the play the AI labs are making is anti-fragile (in the Nassim Taleb sense): > The very act of resisting feeds what you resist and makes it less fragile to future resistance. At least along certain dimensions. I don't think the labs themselves are antifragile. Obviously we all know the labs are training on everything (so write/act the way you want future AIs to percei…
Instead of anti-fragility, I'd point you to the law of requisite variety instead.
You'll notice that all AI improvements are insanely good for a week or two after launch. Then you'll see people stating that 'models got worse'. What happened in fact is that people adapted to the tool, but the tool didn't adapt anymore. We're using AI as variety resistant and adaptable tools, but we miss the fact that most deployments nowadays do not adapt back to you as fast.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#38This is mislead by the nerd philosophy that the tech is the business. It absolutely isn’t, the tech is a small part of a startup. Witness that Spotify continues to exist despite being known and replicated by the major giants.
Poetically expressed, but ultimately based on a false notion of what a business actually is.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#39Dark 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...
To quote from the book: > “First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.” 1. you can never know the intentions of other entities…
That’s true among human societies as well, but trade leads to more prosperity.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#40This is mislead by the nerd philosophy that the tech is the business. It absolutely isn’t, the tech is a small part of a startup. Witness that Spotify continues to exist despite being known and replicated by the major giants. Poetically expressed, but ultimately based on a false notion of what a business actually is.
It's nuanced. Spotify is a giant, I think the example you're looking for here is Soundcloud. They almost went bust, but managed to get the ads business right and seem to be afloat now. So I think you're right in that sense, but also wrong in the sense that if I'm building a desktop app or tooling software, my business is probably much easier to get replicated and displaced.