The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
opennhp.org
opennhp.org
> […] 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's fictional universe contains a plethora of quiet civilizations which do not reveal themselves, as in a "dark forest"...filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost".[182][183][184] This idea has come to be known as the dark forest hypothesis.[185][186][187]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is...
> The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life such as theirs as an inevitable threat and thus destroy any nascent life that makes itself known. As a result, the electromagnetic radiation surveys would not find evidence of intelligent alien life.[8][9] […]
> The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest,[11] as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts".[12][13] According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilisation can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
* Kurzgesagt (10m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE
(Cixin's novel probably made the idea famous, but others (Brin, Bear) have explored it previously.)
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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 done.
3. Progress is unstoppable. If one group hasn’t mastered fusion yet, they will say in a thousand years — and then they’ll come for the others because of points 1 and 2.
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The author builds the novel on the idea that we shouldn’t be sending signals into space, but rather stay quiet and avoid drawing attention. Because in his view, once one civilization detects a signal from another, the safest move is to eliminate it immediately — without taking the risk of finding out whether it’s friendly (for now) or already not.
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.
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.
> Be it waste handling, colonisation, industrial revolution, slavery, oil extraction etc etc.
Interestingly, most of these have seen lots of progress in reducing the harms - if not practically eliminating it altogether, such as with slavery.
Looking it from a white, western male perspective, you're right. From other perspectives this might well not be the case.
A lot of technology has short term benefits but are, in the long term, net negative to either us as species or the environment around us - which is the life support system for us. We as a society have not got a "undo" button for much of this technology, since once the damage has been done in real life, it stays in real life.
So we develop technology, see it fail, and try to fix the issues with more technology not realising that technology might be the problem. Or perhaps it's because we don't have the simplicity of an "undo" button.
Why bother digging up a carbon laden energy source from the depths of a gravity laden planet instead of using solar energy or wind or any other energy source that is less harmful?
Seems really illogical … oh wait, thats just an intelligent life-form.
Well at least one reason might be that you're currently unable to use those latter forms of energy as well as you can the former.
Anyway, using the way we act as a comparison for how these other civilizations might act doesn't make sense to me - we're nowhere even remotely close to being a threat to other civilizations. By the time a civilization reaches the point where they can travel between stars, I do suspect they'll be using renewables pretty dang heavily
I'm not talking about mining asteroids, I'm talking about other sources of energy that have been known to us but which we don't utilise because of self-interest of oil companies - not money or cost, self interest. Money & cost are regulated by us not money.
So to say these other sources of energy weren't viable from a financial PoV might be correct but it goes against our own self-interest.
> I do suspect they'll be using renewables pretty dang heavily
That's like saying "in any case, the future will be better". As humans have shown, worse comes before better in history. Howabout making the present better first?
"Commercial concentrated solar power plants were first developed in the 1980s. Since then, as the cost of solar panels has fallen, grid-connected solar PV systems' capacity and production have doubled about every three years. Three-quarters of new generation capacity is solar"
This says nothing of, say, hydro power, which we have been using for a while
> That's like saying "in any case, the future will be better". As humans have shown, worse comes before better in history. Howabout making the present better first?
Mate I said nothing about our future or present. It's just absurd to assume our past has any bearing on how super-advanced space-faring civilizations will utilize technology.
And technological acceleration is a constant in that universe, the attackers were just a bit ahead of us in technological advancement, lets say a few hundred years, not the millions or billions of years ahead of the very bad ones.
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.
We had an awesome book club talking about historical sci-fi and modernity. He always saw the optimistic side, how humanity could conquer, but I, child of Amazon, could see the end-stage capitalism.
Makes for fantastic dialogue. Read the book series. It’s worth it!
I didn’t draw the original premise. I just pointed out that they didn’t understand the Dark Forest. At all.
How does it compare to tor hidden services?
[0] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-fo...
edit: The essay is from 2020
AI in our context is the inverse. Everyone can spend “credits” to get a supergenius coder.
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 provide a competitive advantage if used and improved internally without disclosure.
So there is a potential growing development/information/frontier asymmetry, of unknown magnitude and velocity.
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.
God knows what is sleeping on our machines today.
I once hear there are very very expensive tools with luxurious gui's that bundle bags of fresh exploits and receive new ones over the tubes.
The guy told me that most of the code involved cleaning up after it self.
I think the AI will only run known exploits? Its nice to find those but if anyone really wants in it's just a matter of money.
I'm curious what applications we can bake into hardware. You can't insert malicious bread into a toaster to gain access to other things.
This is actually a good example of how much better the human-written original is to its AI slop copy.
Anthropic just launched Claude Code Security.
AI is entering cybersecurity — permanently.
But here’s the uncomfortable question:
What happens when attackers automate faster than defenders react?
Attackers have always been ahead. Its been reality since we've been permanently online