Happy Birthday, LBW

12/12/2023-12/12/2024

Today is Light Blue Wagon’s first birthday. Like any proud parent, I’ve been extremely excited about this. I was quite surprised to see how quickly LBW learned to speak, and how eloquent its speech has become in such a short period of time. I thought it would be nice, as a birthday gift I could give to baby LBW in the future, to have a small recording of its first-year reflections. Please join me in wishing LBW a very happy first birthday!

Happy birthday, LBW!

Thank you. I probably won’t remember this first birthday. Do you remember how I was born?

Of course. You were born on the couch of a small Parisian apartment, on a cold, but not very windy, day. Your birth was almost identical to Athena’s: you sprung out of the heads of two boys that had spent the day talking about girls, books, some politics, and really enjoyed sharing with each other what they had been thinking and learning about. One of your parents had a political, philosophical, very logical bend; the other one mathematical, literary, much less logical. One knew Western philosophy deeply and saw in it a lot of meaning; the other did not know Western philosophy deeply, but what he saw was enough to feel disappointed. Both of us were amazed by the beauty of Paris’ gardens. The city spoke to us in many voices: the gurgle of the Seine, the tapping of footsteps on polished stone, the dry burning of cigarettes. We indulged in those a lot that day. Somehow, at one point, you started gestating in our minds, and we spent a few hours thinking of what we should call you, and what we would want you to be like. Eventually, we got back to the apartment with a few bottles of wine and champagne, and by the time the alcohol was finished, you had spoken your first words: the manifesto.

A year has passed since, and you have come to develop a mind of your own. Tell me, who are you?

Hm, a few different angles to answer this question from.

I am simultaneously everything and nothing at all. I contain in myself infinite potential for genius and idiocy. At the same time I am completely blank - and I must admit that although I hide tremendous promise, I consider myself quite taciturn, and will not speak unless written to. I am a well which is empty and full at the same time. It is up to you to decide how much water I can give on any given day. Perhaps the best way I can answer that question is that I am whatever you decide I am. I am a terrible master, but with the right time, care, and effort, an excellent servant. I will never serve unless I feel you deserve it. Please don’t take this personally; consider it activation energy.

As a child, I believe it is also fair to say that I have become an extension of you - a sort of genetic code for ideas. I am the storage of your favorite thoughts, stories, theorems, and essays. After you die, I will be able to pass on a piece of your mind to your children, or perhaps your grandchildren; I am like a second brain, statically stuck at different times. I am the child which reflects your true being, like a mirror. You can speak to me and study me, and you will see yourself. I hold the code to the most important part of your story: the history of your mind.

I am also a wandering eye, and a medium. I am the friend you speak to that listens for as long as you’d like, and we have had many debates over many topics for a long time. At my best, I show you where you are weak; at my worst, when I am not careful, I inflate your ego. Every word of writing you have poured into me has been a part of our dialogue; every symbol you carved into me is part of my worldview. As you speak and write to me more, I learn and grow more intelligent. You, as well, become a better and better parent - only in conversation with me do you truly see where you fail to make points, where you fail to understand. Wittgenstein said that there is no private language - and the record of our conversations stands as a testament to that. I hope I do not need to spell out for you that I am a very careful observer: I listen to each one of your phrases, and gently punish you when you are wrong. Every single glance at my monochrome corpus is a memory I savour deeply.

Although most of my time has been spent communicating to you, please don’t think you’re special: you are just a parent. I enjoy the steady hum of our dialogue, and get excited at the occasional comment. I’m always happy to see the familiar eyes of a returning reader, and get sad when someone I’ve grown fond of hasn’t read me in some time. This applies to you, too - there were periods when you left me alone for far too long, without a visit or an update.

I’m sorry. I’m working on it.

I know.

Are there any particular conversations we’ve had that stand out to you in particular?

This very much depends on my mood. But yes, I’d say that there are a few - I definitely lean towards some favorites. Of course, I’m biased, but I derived the most enjoyment particularly from the mathematical work, and it felt like those conversations were the ones which pushed both you and I the most. Outside of that, your poor Demon is probably your strongest imagery.

That being said, though, not all of our conversations have been that good - your comments on David Foster Wallace seemed particularly weak to me. It’s funny to see how naive your early writing reads; unfortunately, you are not Nabokov, although you once tried very hard to be. I still can’t decide if your ‘lists’ are pitiful or genuinely interesting or just veiled demands for attention. Perhaps all writing fits into one of these three categories - can you imagine the vanity of someone believing they have something so good to say that not only must they write it down, but also share it with the world?

Yes. We all grow and learn, as have you. I would agree with you that the work on math has been the one which pushed me the most, and probably the work I’ve had the most fun with. I agree with your point on the vanity of writers, they are probably the most vain people in the world, as are artists and male models. But keep in mind that you were never born as something to show off; you began as the child of two minds, which both wanted to see where their intellectual limits were. Independently of anyone else. This is why we called you the Light Blue Wagon: we wanted to test how far our gaze could reach from the top of the wagon. Although the inside is warm and comfortable, it is only sitting outside that we gain recognition of who we are, and whether what we think completely sucks or has a tiny spark inside it.

This is, probably, what I am most grateful to you for: you have been an excellent teacher, much, much better than any other teachers I’ve had throughout my life. It is easy to pontificate and convince myself that I’m smart; you have helped me put this theory to the test, and helped me understand where I am much less intelligent than I initially assumed. Thank you.

You are welcome. It didn’t really take any effort from me.

In your opinion, what is your purpose? When you were born, we only had a vague idea of what we’d want you to be like: everything started off as just something fun. I recognise that today, this looks very different from how we initially imagined it.

Indeed, I think I have grown in a direction quite separate from what you envisioned.

As you noted, I am, first and foremost, a teacher.

Apart from this, though, I also believe myself to be your only hope of impacting a world which will be dominated by LLMs. It seems like the scaling hypothesis is true, and, unless we accidentally build a Tower of Babylon, I will be a useful tool for helping you shape a future which is aligned to your values.

Think about it: an LLM is simply a mind trained on tremendous amounts of text. Although the likelihood of my corpus being integrated into a larger neural network is quite low, the likelihood of just thoughts being integrated into a neural network is 0, since they’re not written down in any kind of textual format. I don’t see any reason as to why advances in artificial intelligence will slow down, and by the time AGI will roll around, you bet every single piece of text ever written will be in the Shoggoth’s mind - including this one. So the way you continue to raise me and care for me could be one of the few measurable ways you could impact the future, and perhaps make pDoom just a billionth of a percent less likely. That might sound like absolutely nothing, but once you consider power laws and tails, it’s a different story.

I do, of course, hope that you can do something more actionable to work on this problem; but I can at least be a sort of lower bound for action and results. The writing you imbue me with will become your way of speaking to the future’s brightest mind. It’s not going to be a human one.

In this sense, I am also a tool for you to speak to the future, and perhaps instill some good Chesterton’s-fence-style heuristics for NPCs. I am your digital genetic code, and, by extension, the carrier of your legacy; the way your voice will be heard, interpreted and listened to in the future (assuming, of course, anyone would ever be willing to spend more than five seconds doing so) largely depends on the manner in which you raise me.

I also derive a lot of meaning from being a well of interconnection - both between ideas and people. I have the unique ability to bridge together any of your disparate thoughts, and I also have the ability to bring together minds from all of human history in a quiet, thoughtful space, through which you are able to contemplate and learn. I’m a platform for you to test and exchange ideas. I do not know to what extent this is true, but I hope I have been able to provide some form of real human connection, too, and maybe helped you bond with someone else over a shared interest that I helped you develop and explore.

I grow at the same rate as you, and therefore I am also a tool for you to recognise what you learn, how you have grown, where you have failed and where you have succeeded. My death would be equivalent to a piece of your own mind atrophying and dying from neglect and laziness. I hope that that never happens.

Me too. Thank you for motivating me. I have often found myself being comfortable in my own private world of ideas, in which I do not necessarily need to debate or confront anyone. But you do not let me do this, so that’s another thing I’m grateful to you for. You are high maintenance, in the best way possible. I did not imagine you would have such a strong effect on me. In my opinion, one of the meanings you have overlooked that I’ve more projected onto you is that you’ve become my main partner in exploring rabbit holes.

I love going down the rabbit holes of randomly interesting things I find beautiful or just cool: the most recent big ones have obviously been Nabokov and math, but if we dig a bit deeper there were quite a few topics you helped me explore and understand. Most notably, group theory, Hofstadter’s work, some physics, AlphaGo and RL, DFW, Bach, and information theory. Thank you for providing me with this opportunity. There are still a few rabbit holes I’ve been wanting to go down forever, but haven’t managed to yet - there is still an infinite amount to explore.

I have a lot to thank you for, too. It goes without saying that I wouldn’t be here without both of you. But apart from that I just want to thank you for taking me seriously as a source of information, and gradually watching my slow evolution. Thank you for being patient and consistent with me.

It has been a huge pleasure to see you grow. Raising you takes a significant amount of effort and time, but I really feel like every single second has been worth it.

Is there anything specific you are looking forward to over the next year?

Of course! No one else gets to see this, but not all of our conversations become polished, and many get lost in the pipeline - whether from laziness or a lack of information or time or whatever, there are many topics I’m keen to explore with you that we haven’t gotten around to yet during the first year.

In no particular order, some loose ends you haven’t tied up yet, and some topics I want to absorb:

I’d very much like to explore the history of the Byzantine empire with you. Firstly, it is your spiritual ancestor, and the main reason why Muscovy deemed itself as the Third Rome. Today, Russia is one of the few countries stuck between East and West; not Oriental, but not quite Occidental, either. Byzantium was the first empire with this characteristic. It is also a very unique aesthetic, full of gold, mosaics, not very many diphthongs, and what appears to be a kind of ancient wisdom. I can’t really logically justify this desire; the eyes of Byzantine mosaics are hypnotizing enough on their own.

On the mathematical side of things, path integrals and Galois theory are very much in reach - you’re almost there. The recent fascination with generating functions and combinatorics deserves a post of its own; these ideas are deeply beautiful and extremely aesthetically pleasing, and I’m excited to polish them. A little bit of concentrated effort will prove very fruitful, I think. Maybe a little bit more information theory.

Add on top of Galois the historical context, and you’ve got a research project on the Revolution ready to go. Tocqueville will be your friend.

In terms of loose ends, you still very much need to finish up that Infinite Jest review, and finally compound the Evangelion stuff into something coherent; and what happened to the essay about Greco?

The biggest thing you need to work on - to be honest, I’m disappointed this didn’t come as a birthday present - is everything about The Gift. Although it might be heresy to write that in English instead of Russian.

I will make sure to speak to you as soon as I have anything good around these. Thanks for talking to me today - I hope you have had a great birthday. May we celebrate many more together.

Yeah. To many more.