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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Also, there is absolutely no abuse of power in Banks' society. This would certainly be a problem in a fully-automated capitalist society. I think Banks is a great inspiration, but it is not a world we will get by default. It needs active political effort.

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This is abuse of power in these books, sometimes even quite blatant. Player of Games has probably the best example, since it has blackmail and extortion of a Culture citizen by an AI, with the help of a ship's Mind. Not to mention cheating at a board game.

That said, the Culture does seem like it would be a nice place to live, over all.

The Culture series of books are the most uplifting things I've read. They just make me feel great, especially the parts that take place on Orbitals (apart from the strange shit in the first book).

You might also enjoy Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson (http://constellation.crummy.com/).

Banks' society is explicitly post-ownership; it's fully-automated luxury anarcho-cyberism. It relies entirely on benevolent near-omnipotent AI.

Banks himself was distinctly anti-capitalist.

IIRC not from humans, but some Minds still did abuse their power in Excession.

Abuse of power is absolutely an issue for a fully automated society. Ultimately, somebody is in control.

Take the current political situation in the US. Trump would love for everybody to blindly obey him. His autocratic goals are frustrated by the fact that government is made up of people who are able to resist the government they are part of if they believe it's going wrong. Without those people, Trump could count on the obedience of the literal machinery of government. Having people involved can be an extra layer of protection against abuse.

absolutely no abuse of power in Banks' society

':-|

finally a good plaintext candidate for the thinking emoji shortcut!

That statement makes no sense either, the Culture had an explicit department for abusing it's power, Special Circumstances.

I think his point was that even if you live in a post-scarcity anarcho-communist society where everyone is live and let live, the rest of the universe isn't an occasionally you need headbangers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Circumstances

It's obviously more nuanced than that, but you'll end up in an argument of semantics pretty quickly. All the SC/Mind scheming is ultimately coming down to what we consider to be morally correct, so it'll be a discussion of whether e.g. letting a person die in order to serve a greater good constitutes abuse of power or not. The theme of the Culture series is what we would want to do if we could do anything we wanted, and there's not a clear-cut response to that. The egocentric part of the equation is reduced a lot.

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