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The Cognitive Dark Forest

ryelang.org

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Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#121

Post by middayc »

0x3f wrote: post #52
lstodd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the idea does not make sense once you include intel being incomplete into the equation: what if the preemptive strike will not attain complete eradication? You might or might not fatally cripple the opponent, but retaliation can do that too and you cannot be sure that it won't. It's MAD all over again.

Well if they're only an upstart, they don't have the ability to destroy you _yet_. You 'nuke' them in the hope they won't get that ability. You're aiming to stop MAD from being a thing. In those terms, the US should have been nuking and dominating everyone, and the idea was floated after WW2, but I believe they were precluded by practical limitations. If they had developed the tech outside of wartime, and built up a…

The dynamics at least with the space dark forest is different than when we live on the same planet. It has to do with lack/slow communication over vast space (that you can't trust anyway).

It relied on two principles "the chain of suspicion" and "technological explosion", which don't hold true if we are on the same planet. You can google it (or llm it) :)

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#122

Post by storus »

This has some grain of truth though companies would only execute your ideas if they don't destroy their own business. Imagine creating your own Bloomberg Terminal/Capital IQ using agentic AI - you'd directly attack incumbents and not give them more profitable ideas. For potentially profitable ideas one could just look at all companies Google/Meta bought in the past and killed, then just redo them using AI.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#123

Post by oh_my_goodness »

satvikpendem wrote: post #107
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. The fact that they know your app better than you do, and that they can revoke your ability to develop it at any moment, those are just details. Those things won't change the game at all.

Unless you're using their API (in which case there's always platform risk, same as before), this is not an issue. There are lots of half assed implementations of ideas by the big companies that smaller companies run circles around, Innovator's Dilemma was literally written about this.

In my opinion Christensen wasn't talking about outsourcing your entire development process to a competitor with much deeper pockets, giving them the ability to turn off your development at will [1], and then running rings around them. I'm sure you're familiar with his story about Dell and Asus. This is worse.

[1] Unless you're assuming that you maintain control over your technology while outsourcing most of the development thinking to a rented AI? Times have changed, and the API is not the only issue anymore.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#125

Post by zhoujing204 »

irl_zebra wrote: post #118
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.

How far is "near," really? Human civilization took tens of thousands of years just to discover a new continent, and the ocean back then was essentially as vast and impenetrable as space is today. If we ever actually develop near-lightspeed spacecraft, are we seriously assuming the first thing we'd do is build weapons capable of annihilating entire civilizations — and then actually use them? Oh my god, we already have those weapons, and the most likely target has always been ourselves.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#126

Post by munificent »

Skyy93 wrote: post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow.

The article says:

"Ideas are cheap - execution is hard"

"Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind."

That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state of your implementation.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#127

Post by Nevermark »

munificent wrote: post #126
Skyy93 wrote: post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. The article says: "Ideas are cheap - execution is hard" "Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind." That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state o…

Sharing any novel idea has never been so costly.

I am not arguing against sharing. Sharing can be for the greater good.

But as you note, things have changed. We could reasonably assume a genuinely significant good idea, set free, might go in the direction we shoved it for a minute. Or fade into inaccessibility.

Not any more.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#128

Post by middayc »

munificent wrote: post #126
Skyy93 wrote: post #71

This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…

> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. The article says: "Ideas are cheap - execution is hard" "Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind." That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state o…

And it's not just that the execution is faster now. The competition saw the "outer shell" of your idea. But LLM platforms (the forest) - they see the internals, if you used them to explore and develop it. They also see all similar ideas across the globe.

And they own - not rent the compute and models - as you do from them. If we want to extend this, they could "pre-cog" your idea and build it even before you do.

I'm not talking about what is happening now, I'm just playing out the thought experiment.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#129

Post by satvikpendem »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #123
satvikpendem wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're using their API (in which case there's always platform risk, same as before), this is not an issue. There are lots of half assed implementations of ideas by the big companies that smaller companies run circles around, Innovator's Dilemma was literally written about this.

In my opinion Christensen wasn't talking about outsourcing your entire development process to a competitor with much deeper pockets, giving them the ability to turn off your development at will [1], and then running rings around them. I'm sure you're familiar with his story about Dell and Asus. This is worse. [1] Unless you're assuming that you maintain control over your technology while outsourcing most of the devel…

What is the issue? Local models still exist and will continue to exist, and even if they don't, good old fashioned hand coding will never go away. The point is even AI companies are run by people and one company cannot make every product well, there are always gaps in the market that are exploitable.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#130

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make new stuff up in their own incestuous tupperware salesmen ecosystems.

I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space.

Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it

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