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The Cognitive Dark Forest

ryelang.org

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Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#111

Post by bsza »

The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect.

The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#112

Post by middayc »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #108

This post puts forward two paths: 1) Everyone and everything is subsumed into the forest. Innovation becomes unprofitable for the innovator as the one who controls the forest uses their capital to clone every new innovation. 2) Everyone withdraws from the forest. Innovation goes private. The forest stops growing, but doesn't die. --- But there's two things the post doesn't consider: 1) Viral licensing. What happens t…

As the first line of the post says - it's a thought experiment, so comments like yours that open new options and ask new questions are the best outcome.

I have no other comment other than - very interesting. I thought about how the overlying model will change for us, but haven't considered that the underlying model (what you proposed) can change too ... if that makes sense.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#113

Post by daemin »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #108

This post puts forward two paths: 1) Everyone and everything is subsumed into the forest. Innovation becomes unprofitable for the innovator as the one who controls the forest uses their capital to clone every new innovation. 2) Everyone withdraws from the forest. Innovation goes private. The forest stops growing, but doesn't die. --- But there's two things the post doesn't consider: 1) Viral licensing. What happens t…

I asked recently on social media if anyone knows if there has been a legal decision regarding if GPL source code that was used for training an LLM will taint all that LLMs output with the same GPL licence. So far nothing has come up but I think people are wanting to know the answers.

It has been said that Microsoft indemnifies people using its LLM tools against copyright and patent issues, but I don't know if it applies to LLM output which might/should be GPL licenced.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#114

Post by mannanj »

mannanj wrote: post #110
spartanatreyu wrote: post #108

This post puts forward two paths: 1) Everyone and everything is subsumed into the forest. Innovation becomes unprofitable for the innovator as the one who controls the forest uses their capital to clone every new innovation. 2) Everyone withdraws from the forest. Innovation goes private. The forest stops growing, but doesn't die. --- But there's two things the post doesn't consider: 1) Viral licensing. What happens t…

what about we properly implement copyright and protection for software to prevent cloning style theft? I mean we haven't had an innovation in patents and trademark for software for how long? Why is it that only hardware can be copyrighted and trademarked - can we really find no way to do this that can't be abused by patent trolls?

[dead]

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#116

Post by zar1048576 »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #95
RajT88 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. You've almost captured the full picture of it. If you have a great idea, it's not going to be self-evidently enough of a great idea until you've proved it can make money. That's the hard part which comes at great personal, professional and financial risk. Algorithms are cheap. Sure, they could use your LLM history to figur…

> But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers. People don't seem to be focused on the hard parts. Big companies seem to be bad at innovating but really, really good at enterprise sales.

I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I do think that a big part of enterprise sales involves building a comprehensive solution that works well within the customer’s ecosystem. Start-ups usually tend to build point products, which have value, but are still missing functionality (even if that functionality is not scintillating) that customers really desire to easily deploy and maintain solutions. Also, customers do care about things like stability of their vendors and the level of available support.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#117

Post by zhoujing204 »

Liu Cixin's Dark Forest theory is a pretty dumb take, honestly. Just look at Earth — different species don't constantly try to wipe each other out. Sure, it happens sometimes, but it's actually relatively rare, and a lot of the time extinction isn't even intentional. Like, a huge chunk of Native American deaths came from disease, not deliberate extermination.

At the end of the day, Liu Cixin is basically a social darwinist who's got a thing for authoritarianism, and it bleeds through pretty heavily into his work. Dude is massively overrated imo.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#118

Post by irl_zebra »

zhoujing204 wrote: post #117

Liu Cixin's Dark Forest theory is a pretty dumb take, honestly. Just look at Earth — different species don't constantly try to wipe each other out. Sure, it happens sometimes, but it's actually relatively rare, and a lot of the time extinction isn't even intentional. Like, a huge chunk of Native American deaths came from disease, not deliberate extermination. At the end of the day, Liu Cixin is basically a social dar…

I think the book specifically and explicitly covered the "dark forest doesn't apply when species are near one another" angle.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#119

Post by middayc »

bsza wrote: post #111

The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect. The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even de…

This is interesting.

When I read if for the second time, trying to understand it - maybe even better match for the low orbit flying garbage would be "enshitification"? As the time goes on, more and more garbage is produced, and we have no clear way or specific motivated entity to start removing it so it just grows.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#120

Post by convexly »

Most people already have this problem with their own thinking though. You make a big call at work, it plays out over 6 months, and by the time you know whether or not it was right you've already rewritten why you made it. That feedback loop barely exists.
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