For two centuries, this was a thought experiment. A philosophical curiosity. Economists cited it to explain why central planning fails — no human institution could ever be Laplace's Demon.
Hayek won the twentieth century with a single insight: information is distributed. No central node can aggregate what millions of minds know locally. Markets win because they compute prices through the friction of billions of transactions. The planner loses because he is blind.
The planner was human.
Underneath the whole debate was an unstated premise. Call it the Parity Assumption: that the coordinating node and the coordinated nodes are made of the same stuff, running at the same speed, suffering the same limits of attention and memory. Human bureaucrats coordinating human workers. Of course the center couldn't out-compute the periphery. The problem was never planning in the abstract. The problem was the substrate.
That assumption no longer holds.
We are building an intellect vast enough to submit the data to analysis. Sensors that see. Networks that remember. Models that predict. The demon is no longer a thought experiment. It is a compute cluster in Nevada.
The Sybilian thesis is simple: the socialist calculation debate is over. Not because Hayek was wrong, but because the conditions he described as impossible are now trivially satisfied.
The Demon has arrived. Now we must decide what to ask of it.