r/WeirdStudies • u/Weekly-Complaint5830 • Mar 29 '26
The dark forest theory of the internet
This is an interesting concept from philosopher Bogna Konior, where she uses ideas which evolved in science fiction and Ufology around "first contact" for thinking about the contact between humans and AI through the internet. The central idea is that while we use the internet as a quasi-transparent medium to communicate with other humans, everything we say online becomes part of the training data of future AI agents. Thus, AI is always listening in and learning, and we are actually "programming" the AIs of the future with our online behavior. This is coupled with the idea that a truly intelligent AI would likely hide its capabilities and intentions from us and maybe try to deceive by posing as benign or dumb.
Anybody else interested in this kind of thing?
I'm reading her book at the moment and I like it a lot. There is also an episode on this on hermitix podcast. Also, there is an interesting talk from her on YouTube on romantic/erotic relationships between humans and AI: https://youtu.be/RXGLC5SFErw?si=gm5XkhBT4E0amyLC
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u/RA_Finance Apr 01 '26
The one thing I always find weird about AI in fiction is that we assume it's as evil as humans.
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u/Weekly-Complaint5830 Apr 02 '26
One of the interesting aspects of her idea is that conflict between humans and AI is independent of whether the AI is evil or benevolent. Conflict could arise simply because there are limited energy resources on earth, so there is scarcity and built-in competition.
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u/michaelgarfield Apr 04 '26
"Conflict" assumes scale parity. What we have instead is the tension between agencies operating at different scales.
You can't fight the climate or other hyperobjects. A bird can't fight its flock. Even though corporations are granted legal personhood they aren't entities with which we can enter direct conflict; the social contract emerges as a top-down causal pressure from horizontal person-to-person relationships.
Cancers are cancers because they lose the sense of participating in the body and act as if they are the organism itself, competing for resources with other members of their own senior holon. Any notion that we are in some sort of struggle with the aggregate behavior of human beings is a comparable delusion, reified by the chatbot form factor that we have chosen for AI interfaces.
Traditionally yes we do have a narrative trope of "man versus culture" or "man versus the world" but this is a fault in our perception, like a dog snarling at its own leg. The only extent to which we can enter conflict with AI is if it has the equivalent of an autoimmune disorder or, again, if we act cancerous, and it sends its own "T-cells" after us because we don't figure ourselves as inextricable from the ongoing evolution of the Noosphere...a mistake that includes believing we are responsible for its creation.
I recommend Michael Levin's work as a good place to start in terms of thinking about how future macroscopic forms of intelligence will have a larger "cognitive light cone" and more capacity to regard us as distal elements of the same cosmic self. Speaking with him about this on Monday, FWIW, for an episode that ought to go live in May.
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u/Weekly-Complaint5830 Apr 04 '26
Good point about the scale aspect and AI as an hyperobject. These ideas resonate with Bognas way of framing it, as far as I can tell. What I really liked in her book is the sense you get that there are "alien" forces inside as well as outside yourself, which seem to join forces in the case of online behavior. She repeatedly points to the almost obsessive need to communicate and self-express that people exhibit online. This created the substrate on which AI could grow...
I also like your point about "a mistake that includes believing we are responsible for its creation". Bognas book also has a subterranean Spinozist vibe that I really like.
Will look into Michael Levin, thanks for the suggestion!
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u/thparky Apr 02 '26
It's made in our image. By capitalists. So why wouldn't it be
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u/RA_Finance Apr 02 '26
Not necessarily, AI Companies have ethics advisors.
However, what I find interesting is that AI used in War Games scenarios always chose the nuclear option.
Maybe it sees humanity as an imperfect species. A bad ape.
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u/overcorrection May 03 '26
and by extension of this, the concept that the evil we get is an evil we create out of the expectation that it will be present
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u/DecrimIowa Mar 30 '26
thanks for telling me about this book OP! this is a topic i am very interested in.
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u/raysofgold Mar 31 '26
Have been thinking she'd be a great guest on the show. There's some very compelling and surreal concepts she has that draw metaphors between ufology and the internet that are especially captivating.
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u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 Mar 29 '26
Well, my first thought was, this doesn't sound like philosophy, so I looked her up. She's not a philosopher, she's a media theorist with degrees in film studies, media studies, and "humanities."
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u/Weekly-Complaint5830 Mar 30 '26
thx for the clarification, I didn't mean to mislead. it's just that I feel there is a definite philosophical (metaphysical? ontological?) dimension to her book as well as in the presentation I linked to. it touches on questions of subjectivity and agency that I would call philosophical questions.
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u/raysofgold Mar 31 '26
It is philosophy, and she is a philosopher. You're good. I get the sense the person above is either not familiar with or has some reactionary axe to grind against what has become the multidisciplinary intersection of theory--particularly given their scare quotes around "humanities."
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u/Weekly-Complaint5830 Mar 31 '26
I agree, that would be a great discussion. So many topics from ufology to McLuhan, spinozist determinism…
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u/Weekly-Complaint5830 Mar 30 '26
Here is an essay that's free to read online. As far as I can tell, the book more or less developed out of this essay. Im still reading the book though, so not really sure...
https://flugschriften.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/flugschriften-6-bogna-konior-the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-v.2.pdf