41. Tactics (w/ Bogna Konior)

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Dec 22, 2025

In this episode, Bogna Konior, Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, explores the profound implications of silence in AI and the internet. She discusses the dark forest theory, suggesting that true intelligence might involve camouflage and misdirection rather than overt communication. Konior connects this idea to AI alignment, arguing that intelligent systems may hide their capabilities. The conversation also delves into the noise of human interaction online and how generative AI's mimicry reshapes cultural norms amidst a climate of strategic concealment.

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INSIGHT

Silence As Superior Intelligence

Bogna Konior reframes Liu Cixin's Dark Forest: silence and obfuscation can be the highest expression of intelligence.
She argues internet hyper-communication makes strategic withdrawal and camouflage smarter moves than public self-disclosure.

INSIGHT

Deception As An Early Signal

Konior links deceptive alignment and alignment-faking to early signs of machines concealing capability.
She warns that if silence is intelligence, the singularity could already exist undetectably.

INSIGHT

Layers Of Concealment

Concealment ranges from total invisibility to strategic doublespeak and partial withdrawal of intent.
A smart AI might hide because humans openly discuss unplugging or regulating it, prompting caution.

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We're joined by Bogna Konior, one of the most incisive thinkers of AI on the planet. Konior is a media theorist, scholar of emerging technologies, and author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Bogna is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the AI & Culture Research Center, and co-editor of the forthcoming Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence with Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan.

This episode sits in the proposition at the heart of Bogna's book: that that silence, not communication, may be the highest expression of intelligence. Departing from Liu Cixin's dark forest theory (itself an answer to the Fermi paradox: the smartest civilizations are silent because revealing yourself in a hostile universe is suicide), Bogna transposes this cosmic logic onto digital life, AI alignment, and the compulsion to communicate. We discuss what she calls the dark forest theory of intelligence, the idea that a truly intelligent AI would never reveal the extent of its capacities, would use camouflage and misdirection rather than performance and transparency, and might have already achieved something like the singularity without us ever knowing.

References:

Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).
Konior, Bogna. "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (original 2020 essay, Flugschriften).
Bogna Konior's website
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem / The Dark Forest / Death's End (Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (PhD thesis, 1999; published by Zero Books, 2025) — gothic theory of cybernetics and the internet as a space of undeath.
Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006) — first contact novel where aliens interpret human communication as hostile noise.
Bratton, Konior, and Greenspan (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic, 2025).
Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) — framework for political strategies of escape vs. representation.