The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter(opennhp.org)
opennhp.org
The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
https://opennhp.org/blog/the-internet-is-becoming-a-dark-forest.html
38 comments
This entire page seems incredibly cheaply machine generated, including the text and images. If you want to make a case for your product, you should at least make it look like some effort went into this.
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The “dark forest” vibe feels real, but it’s less sci‑fi and more boring economics: scraping is cheap, attribution is hard, and trust is fragile. I worry the default outcome is everything drifting toward logins/CAPTCHAs/walled gardens—not because people want that, but because “public + unmetered” turns into “free training data + abuse surface.” Feels like we need better primitives for proof-of-origin (signing/publisher identity) and some kind of tiered access for bulk crawling. Anyone seen a non-centralized approach that could actually get adoption?
For anyone not familiar with the concept of "dark forest":
> […] 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.)
> […] 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.)
All the quotes miss the simplicity of 3 rules of Cosmology or whatever it was called in the trilogy.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
Another factor that as far I remember was present in the novel was technological acceleration, by the time you detected the first tries of "turning on the lights" of an emerging civilization many light years away, that civilization is not an emerging one anymore, and even more by the time you can get there, and they may eventually be able to do something to harm or destroy your own civilization, so it is not something that should be left unchecked.
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.
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.
#2 doesn't seem to consider how much stuff there is out there. Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places?
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.
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.
> Why bother harvesting resources from a gravity-laden planet when you can almost certainly get them from asteroids or other places?
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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
That's why I gave the example of solar: we've been able to utilize solar for a long time yet only now is it become a serious source of energy. Windmills have existed for probably 200 years but have not been taken seriously as a source of energy.
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?
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?
We haven't been able to utilize solar to the degree we have been able to utilize oil for all that long, and since it has, our utilization has only grown.
"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.
"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.
I mean we could be just like rodents to them, I won't think people care about uprooting rodents
Maybe, but to me, it would be as if we dug into a prairie dog's tunnels, killed them all and stole whatever little bits of food they have. It just doesn't make sense.
So how is it that the amazon is disappearing? Coincidence or human interference?
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.
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.
Like I said, we should probably care more, and generally speaking, we do, over time. I'm not suggesting we're perfect, that we haven't made any mistakes, or that we won't make any more - just that we're slowly learning how to do better.
> 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.
> 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.
Colonisation and industrial revolution have reduced the harm? For whom?
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.
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.
Fancy. Much more likely they just ruin their own environment and die. It has happened many times before, since the Great Oxygenation Event 2.4B years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
Here's a PBS Space Time episode [1], "Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?", that takes a look at this from a game theory point of view
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXYf47euE3U
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXYf47euE3U
This sort of low effort post, we can all recognize right?
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.
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.
Are you expecting people will 'just' read the three books to get the context of "dark forest" and then come back to this post after that?
And yes, Greg was 100% about grappling with the nuances. One of the smartest men I’ve known.
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!
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!
This entire page is a sales pitch, but it doesn't really cover how things are hidden or how much that costs.
How does it compare to tor hidden services?
How does it compare to tor hidden services?
The website is pure slop with an infinitely low information to noise ratio. Judging by their documentation[0] it's just access control for web servers, so the better question would be how it compares to TLS client auth (which uses proper standards, doesn't require users to install extra software, and doesn't require any extra daemons server-side)
[0]: https://docs.opennhp.org/nhp_quick_start/
[0]: https://docs.opennhp.org/nhp_quick_start/
If you want something a bit more "serious" on this, check out The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Bogna Konior. [0]
[0] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-fo...
[0] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-fo...
Looks like there is also a shorter essay version that came out before the book https://flugschriften.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/flugsch...
edit: The essay is from 2020
edit: The essay is from 2020
Not quite. Cixin Liu’s series had a premise of dramatic asymmetry.
AI in our context is the inverse. Everyone can spend “credits” to get a supergenius coder.
AI in our context is the inverse. Everyone can spend “credits” to get a supergenius coder.
There are still a major asymmetries.
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.
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.
Yep. I agree. I’m assuming that the best model for coding is always six months advanced ahead for the investors. Even with that assumption, there’s a huge democratization effect.
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.
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.
Just s/AI/surveillance state/ and it reads pretty much the same. People in the US you should read NSPM-7 which is obviously simply targeted at this admin's out group. Things seem to be well in motion already from the outward indications we have about DHS spending and disregard for legal processes. People are just still in denial or not paying attention.
Apparently the formal specification of OpenNHP was submitted as an IETF Internet-Draft in January:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-opennhp-saag-nhp/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-opennhp-saag-nhp/
It seems to rehash a much better article by Maggie Appleton. The original has great writing and gorgeous illustrations.
This is actually a good example of how much better the human-written original is to its AI slop copy.
https://maggieappleton.com/forest-talk
This is actually a good example of how much better the human-written original is to its AI slop copy.
https://maggieappleton.com/forest-talk
Analogies - new setting: 20%
PentAGI just launched an open-source AI penetration testing tool.
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?
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?
Is this an AI generated response?
Attackers have always been ahead. Its been reality since we've been permanently online
Attackers have always been ahead. Its been reality since we've been permanently online
Maybe the answer isn’t faster response, but removing default visibility altogether.
Some time around 2010 I update th virus and Trojan definitions on a windows 95 machine that wasn't really used beyond 2004. It had every free scanner one could download. They found over 1500 things. Apparently someone ran a trojan generator on my machine. I don't know when they all became known trojans or if it found all of them but when the box was in use the scanners found nothing.
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.
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.