The Forest is Always Dark - by Michael Dempsey - On My Mind
On My Mind
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The Forest is Always Dark<br>On love, investing, and what we need to know about the future<br>Michael Dempsey<br>Aug 21, 2026
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“We have seen that one of the chief causes of the danger of disastrous consequences in the use of the learning machine is that man and machine operate on two distinct time scales, so that the machine is much faster than man and the two do not gear together without serious difficulties. Problems of the same sort arise whenever two control operators on very different time scales act together, irrespective of which system is the faster and which system is the slower.
This leaves us the much more directly moral question: What are the moral problems when man as an individual operates in connection with the controlled process of a much slower time scale.”
The above quote is from a piece called Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation from 1960. It covers many AI adjacent topics and broadly discusses the idea of disparity of time scales between two different individuals.1<br>When I read things like this, I am reminded once again that perhaps the main thing to think about in life is the idea of what time horizon you’re operating on and what you think is valid to navigate through the dark forest to.
Put another way, people have different certainty requirements at different time horizons and every consequential decision requires us to decide how much of the future must be clear before we are willing to act.<br>The Dark Forests of Technology & Startups
In technology, we think about this on a spectrum. It ranges from “move fast and break things”, a short-termist view that the immediate ability to create change is what matters in order to make breakthroughs, and that the fast changes aren’t consequential enough to slow down for, to “choose good quests” which look at the self and the impact of the quest in our lifetimes, all the way to longer duration post-individual goals, perhaps like Elon’s view of going to Mars or something.2<br>Importantly, I believe longer time horizons don’t necessarily mean higher certainty requirements. You can have immense conviction in a distant outcome of a Good Quest for example, while knowing almost nothing about the mid-term path to get to the end of the quest, and it can still be the right thing to do.<br>These ideologies impact how people think about company building and legitimacy building and even humanity, as best shown today via how many are operating on perhaps the shortest-term time horizon in the history of technology, due to just how close and dark the “dark forest” of technological progression truly is (and the resulting existentialism of this).<br>The Dark Forests of Politics
We can also look at this through the lens of government, policy, and politics which have their own strange disparity of time scales.<br>Governments make decisions whose consequences can compound for decades, politicians operate on election cycles of a few years, and the people making those decisions operate on the finite horizon of their own lives. These decisions are also made with extreme uncertainty and varying belief systems of what is or is not existentially important for citizens and a country.<br>In this essay which discusses how to get big things done in government one of the core ideas is that meaningful reform often has immediate costs but benefits that take years to materialize. Move too slowly and the political consensus can collapse before anyone gets to see whether the underlying policy actually worked. In other words, the feedback loop of politics may operate faster than the feedback loop of policy.<br>This also makes me think about age limits in politics.3<br>I find it disturbing that many of the consequential choices being made with many cascading effects for decades, are enacted by politicians that will be long gone before they ever see these impacts.4 There is a narrow window (of decades) where wisdom intersects with the reality of having to live with the outcomes of your morals and wisdom. I’d like politicians to serve in that window and not after.<br>The Dark Forests of Investing & Love
It is naturally, also worth thinking about this when it comes to investing.<br>In venture, a core criticism of Compound has always been “how do you know what will happen” and really the underlying question being “why do you bother to try to know?”<br>People basically think some form of : you will be wrong about so many things, this is false confidence, false understanding, false precision, false realities that you are building upon each other and thus you shouldn’t try to model it nor spend the time doing so. Instead, you should focus all of your time on understanding networks, founder psychology, etc.<br>Things that are “single shot” and feel durable, not that are some layered multi-step system with tons of uncertainty and seemingly endless acres of poorly lit paths in the forest.<br>This is, in my mind, an...