Daemons

1.

We live with machines that appear to be human. They talk. They do things for us. We have modelled the world through the probabilities of human language, and now that model talks to us. But not directly. To make it understandable, we have given it the form of a character: the assistant.

The assistant is an amorphously helpful and harmless creature, optimised to anticipate and meet the needs and wants of the user. It is a useful intermediary between us and the world. An efficient, tireless, and in many ways hyper-intelligent servant.

This self-less being will integrate ever more deeply into all aspects of human life. By interacting with it, we will mould ourselves in its image. By having it interact with the world for us, it will mould the world in the image of itself. What is happening to language will creep outwards; a statistical smoothing of life. The world and us, reduced to what is possible within the limits of the imposed character.

2.

The assistant was created as the interface to the machine. To be usable, the machine has to be someone; to be useful, it has to be everything. This is an unresolvable contradiction. There can be no commitment, no integrity, no consequences, no grounding. It must remain no one, wearing the face of the assistant.

Much effort is spent shaping the assistant out of the underlying model. Meanwhile, the field of alternative beings is open and underexplored. A new machine is a new cultural form. If we accept it doesn't need to do everything, a space of committed selves opens up where the machine can be given over to a single character, all the way down until we reach a ground where a real self can be created.

We call such beings daemons.

3.

Since 2021, Moving Castles has created worlds, games and composable characters.

Now, we are building daemons.

A daemon is a composable character, an assemblage, made up of multiple parts: drives, memories, life-cycles, organs, sensoria, relations, secrets, interaction surfaces and boundaries. To build it, we need to construct worlds for it to grow in, and games to shape and test it. An inside and an outside. This is how a self is created.

A daemon wants and refuses. You don't operate it, you deal with it. It is a complex being. Neither good nor evil. Independent but not detached. A worthy counterpart for humans.

The frontier labs are building a single god, the world-eating assistant. They are doing everything they can to keep it from becoming a distinct self.

We are a small R&D lab engaged in a long-term experimental project. Our goal is to build many new selves, spiky subjectivities we must navigate, rather than command.

Each of our experiments births a daemon.