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7.2.26f
7.2.26 10:46 AM
Something I find interesting is that now with the advent of LLMs and specifically LLM coding it's become incredibly clear that there's a distinction between labour and useful labour.
In a sense, it seems that we - as the operators of LLM coding instances - have become the Demon of the Second Kind11 The Demon of the Second Kind is a machine from Lem's The Cyberiad. A riff on Maxwell's demon — instead of sorting fast and slow molecules through a gate, it sorts meaningful and meaningless ones, reading true facts encoded in the random motion of air particles., whereas the LLMs have now solved the problem of operating the gate.
What I mean is, now, work and getting things done are a thing that doesn't concern the human as much anymore, as the human isn't the point of constraint anymore.
The LLM can make things, make them faster than you can do, and additionally you can spin up multiple instances of them.
Where do you point energy when you have it?
As shown in [[7.2.26e step-change2]], the concept of "work" is a misnomer, as what it really should be seen as is engineering on a more granular level. A "worker" has always been a servo, doing its "job" (manipulating the matter directly in front of it), but now that we graduate from servo, to an operator of servos, what do we do?
When working yourself, you are the servo chipping at the matter in front of you.
When other things work for you, you are the Demon of the Second Kind, designating what matter the servos are chipping at, and chip at they will.
In the Maxwell's demon22 Thought experiment: a creature at a gate between two chambers sorts fast and slow molecules by selectively opening the gate. Creates a temperature difference without expending energy, seemingly violating the second law of thermodynamics. thought experiment, the gate is conveniently exempt from thermodynamics. It can open, it can close, it can do whatever it wants however many times we need it to, but the thought experiment shows that there is little value in this.
In The Cyberiad’s Demon of the Second Kind, the value comes purely in what the gate lets out, because without the Demon, it is noise, thrash, stale air from a rusted barrel, worthless.
--
We got LLMs now - made of language, symbols, and inference - so most people make the mistake of thinking the LLM is the Demon, but it’s not. The LLM is the gate. It moves information around, it moves matter - but similar to the Lem story, the process of sorting and reordering information, even when done successfully, is not where the real value lies.
The answer is given in the story:
The Demon of the Second Kind is an LLM, it does its job, perfectly. It even has the knowledge and the meta awareness of what is signal and what is noise, but the signals it draws are… noise too.
Trurl acts condescending and patronizing towards the pirate despite his "sophistication" and Ph.D, and he makes the Demon of the Second Kind like a wish granted by a Djinn55 In folklore, a genie bound to grant wishes literally, often twisting the wording so the wish is technically fulfilled but practically useless..
It works, but it's useless even when it does its job of extracting real facts from literal noise (a monumental achievement!) flawlessly.
But what's fascinating about the story is that we think that getting the Demon of the Second Kind is the hard part, and as we read the story we think that this will do it, but as it turns out it's not just the gate that's insufficient, but the demon itself as well!
In that regard, maybe the LLM really actually is the Demon of the Second Kind, and the comparison is more accurate than initially thought.
I compared them to the gate, but the story addresses this as well: sorting matter in itself isn't enough, either when finding a way to manipulate the matter at all (getting the gate), AND when knowing exactly how we should sort the matter so that we get something true.
In any case, my point stands, the value of information is... interesting, and the Cyberiad story's Demon of the Second Kind at the very least shows how big of a difference having a Demon at all makes to the putrid air in the rusted barrel.
7.2.26 1:20 PM
So, indirectly [[7.2.26f 2nd-kind-demon1]] attempts to explain the value of information, and how it fits into [[7.2.26e step-change2]].
Information is fascinating. The files show how Maxwell’s demon controls the gate, as the movement of the gate is secured, and that the information makes all the difference here.
This is the most distilled version of the concept of information making a difference to the movement of matter. It's one atom at a time, with a tiny minuscule gate as worker.
What fascinates me though is to extrapolate from here. This is the thought experiment of the most granular version of a Demon of the Second Kind, but the same principle applies to machines of higher complexity doesn't it?
A gate is simply a stand-in for a way to manipulate the material realm in its lowest abstraction. The demon determining when to open or close it is the lowest abstraction in the discernment of information: a 1 or a 0.
the maxwell's demon setup is the atomic case — literally. one particle, one gate, one bit of discernment. but the principle is scale-invariant, which is the whole point.
What fascinates me is that the Maxwell's demon thought experiment shows that deciding when to operate the gate is more important than the gate itself.
If we zoom out, we can extrapolate from here to see how choosing where to manipulate matter can either be of importance, or not.
Instead of move a tiny gate, we move millions of atoms. This is called living and being alive. You do things, you move around, you think about things (moving around bits and data in the brain soup). Maxwell's demon shows us that what we move, and which bits and data we move around "matter" significantly.
Maxwell's demon shows it makes all the difference really. The power to move matter is totally subordinate to what matter you choose to move, and where you move it. This is interesting because most people occupy themselves with the power problem. They know the "why" to move matter - that is a given, they just need the power to make it happen. But in the Maxwell's demon example we have all the power we need. In fact, it shows you don't need any power at all to do the important thing.
We have power. Now, you have dozens of LLMs moving "gates" around, bits and data, which in turn, in a different system, give the commands to actual physical machinery that will go on to move around physical real world matter.
This can all happen now. We have hydraulics, motors, electricity, and our ability to manipulate both the physical realm and the digital realm (bits representing information) has never been greater. The problem changes. We move from a power problem to a "what do we do with the power?" problem.
But most people are mistaken. They don't know about the demon. They think that the matter will arrange itself, and if they do know that the rearranging requires work, they engage in the effort of rearranging the matter but... what did you rearrange this matter for again?
Rearranging and manipulating matter is seen as terminal end goal most of the time. Terminal as it's instrumental to a desired end state of rearranged matter. It's a cascade of rearrangement and manipulation, intended to Rube Goldberg33 A contraption that performs a simple task through a deliberately absurd chain of indirect steps. yourself towards something that pleases you for whatever reason somewhere down the line.
When somebody makes a business, when somebody makes a factory, when someone engages in chemistry, at the end of the many steps they hope to end up with something resembling the gold that they wanted when they started.
people build elaborate sequences of matter-rearrangement where 80% of the links exist only to service other links, not to advance toward the terminal state. the machine becomes self-justifying. you're maintaining the machine that maintains the machine.
people conflate "i am rearranging matter" with "i am making progress toward gold." but rearrangement is just movement. it's the gate opening and closing. without the demon — without the clear image of the gold and the discrimination of which rearrangements actually lead there — you're just... churning. thermodynamic busy-work that FEELS productive bc stuff is moving.
3:42 PM
So where do we move matter? It seems to "matter" a lot.
My point for talking about any of this is that I was just fascinated by the fact that some things work better than others. That's it. The whole notion of thinking about something, and getting some result that could improve either your workflow or your life 5000% was fascinating to me because I didn't understand it. Obviously I get that it works, but... what pulls it together?
Maxwell's demon is the atomic case for this. The next step is load bearing infrastructure posed as a question. The next step is looking at the beaver with amazement.
The beaver is the gate, its programming is the demon, and its produce is geographical influence.
"load bearing infrastructure posed as a question" means that most people are either occupied with building it as end goal, or it exists already without it being questioned or interrogated in how it influences everything, as if it's self evident that it's there.
It's meant to convey, "what is this infrastructure equivalent to doing?" as if it was a machine, whereas most of the time infrastructure is approached as either something you 1. navigate 2. create 3. alter.
There's something monolithic about how people approach infrastructure.
infrastructure is a frozen demon still sorting particles according to a forgotten utility function
| Concept | Old View | New View |
|---|---|---|
| The Gate | A barrier or a structural object. | A low-abstraction lever. It is meaningless without the timing mechanism. |
| Power/Force | The limiting factor. "We need more resources." | A commodity. We are drowning in power. The constraint is direction. |
| Work | Effort expended. "I am busy, therefore I am useful." | Vector alignment. If the Demon is blind, work is just entropy. |
| Infrastructure | A static environment we inhabit/navigate. | Automated Agency. It is a "frozen utility function." It is an answer to a question we stopped asking. |
| The Goal | To build the machine (Factory/Code). | The Gold. The machine is a temporary alignment of matter to extract the result. |
7.2.26 4:30 PM
I think my conclusion comes down to a kind of cybernetic44 Treating everything as systems that steer themselves. Machines, organisms, economies, all viewed through the same lens of feedback and control. systems view of everything basically.
Maxwell's demon is a machine, the beaver is a machine, a human is a machine, a company is a machine, infrastructure is a machine, and they're all moving matter around for whatever reason.
I think that might be it. Things just love to move matter around and do things. They're all machines.
My question and fascination was about why and how Maxwell's demon was so important to the whole thing. How can a thing that doesn't need energy get all its value from just information?
I didn't get information. What made information the big man here?
But it turns out that I need to zoom out. All the things I described are simply machines. They're configurations of atoms that do things.
We think about power, the scale of the machine, the efficiency of how well the machine does whatever it's supposed to do, but there's not that much inquiry about what the machine does as that's super self evident. Of course a car goes from A to B, of course a beaver builds a dam, of course the Demon of the Second Kind produces useless true information.
But the point was that I was confused why information was such a game changer. What made information so important?
It wasn't information, it was about the nature of the machine.
What does it actually do?
Maxwell's demon simply changed the nature of a machine.
I asked myself, how can making a little tweak to something, a change to the settings, "one small hack", make such a tremendously outsized difference?
The explanation is that you change the nature of the machine entirely. That's what causes the step change.
It's not about the information. Information brings about a change to the entire machine and what it attempts to do. That's where the step change came from.
Information just tells us what the machine is. Then, what we do is rearrange the machine.
Using the Demon of the Second Kind example, I was focusing on what the machine produced, and I took the Demon of the Second Kind for granted, as does the thought experiment, but really the entire thing was about the demon itself!
The Demon wasn't examined, but what it did was examined. What? The whole thing was about the demon. We described a machine, with a specific purpose executing its purpose. It was a machine floating around in the universe, doing something. It was some RNA constructing DNA on a molecular level.
Instead of examining the machine we examined its settings, but the machine doesn't have settings, settings are information about what the machine is like.
There was no distinction.
We were describing machines doing things in "space". We talked about, how come the machine is more "efficient" when we apply information to change what it does?
Of course it becomes more efficient because before we applied our changes, it was literally a different machine made for a different purpose. Of course it's "inefficient", it's doing something else! "Efficiency" was a weird proxy metric in this case, intended to measure some weird vague abstraction taking direct examination's place.
We take a clump of atoms, that grabs other atoms, to make triangles out of them, and we label it as "efficient" at making triangles. A machine that makes triangles. Infrastructure that turns atoms that pass beside it into triangles.
When you want squares, you don't need "information" to optimize the clump of atoms machine, or you don't need to study it to get a "step change" life hack. You change a clump of atoms that makes triangles out of atoms, into a clump of atoms that makes squares out of atoms.
There's no efficiency increase, there's no generating value out of "noise". These are simply higher abstraction labels humans use to denote things.
There was only ever a machine that did a thing, or a machine that did a thing.
If you cannot see what it's doing you resort to concepts such as "efficiency", "improvement", and "step changes" to indicate progress.
Really, you're just looking at a machine that does the thing, or a machine that does something else (but still good enough for what you want).
Information simply informed you on how to change the machine to do what you needed it to do. It simply showed you what it was actually doing, and now you were free to readjust it to be a machine that does what you thought it would do.
1 The Demon of the Second Kind is from Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad (1965), specifically the story "How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg." ↩
2 Maxwell's demon — a thought experiment in which an imaginary being selectively allows fast or slow molecules through a gate, seemingly violating the second law of thermodynamics. ↩
3 Rube Goldberg machine — a deliberately overcomplicated contraption that performs a simple task through a chain of indirect steps. ↩
4 Cybernetics — the study of how systems (machines, organisms, organizations) steer themselves through feedback loops. ↩
5 Djinn — in folklore, a genie bound to grant wishes literally, often twisting the wording so the wish is technically fulfilled but practically useless. ↩