Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks | Hacker News Reader

Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

sciphijournal.org

77 pointsmpweiher31 comments

As the article says, Banks' thing is post-scarcity [1]. It's not too difficult to imagine PS as one of two possible steady state conditions for us.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

Technically, we are in a position of resource abundance, and ready for a PS economy. Unfortunately, greed is keeping us down.

If we ever want to develop into a Culture-style society, now is exactly the time when we need to start planning the path to get there.

This is a really interesting article with a lot of insight into the way that human societies function and spread, and how the Culture works with those ideas.

The thing I find doubtful though - the novels are essentially an exploration of a type of society that may happen if technology progresses in a certain way. It's interesting and fun to read about, but we don't have any particular reason to believe that technology will work in such a way to make such a society possible, or whether it's actually practical if it is.

The nature of technology tends to direct a lot of the ways that societies work. The Culture essentially depends on the development of "perfect" AI. That we eventually figure out how to build General AIs that are smart and effective enough to accomplish useful things, yet never develop a desire to do things other than what their proscribed role is. Why do slap-drones become slap-drones? Do they have to volunteer for the duty, or do they just get manufactured with a desire to be a slap-drone that never changes? Can they actually be effective if they aren't capable of thinking about what they're doing and why? If they do change their minds, can they retire or switch to another job and be replaced? Who gives them their assignments and operating parameters? And the same question applies to all of the other drones and Minds and other machine intelligences that operate all of their factories and orbitals and GVSs and such.

The Culture also seems to be built around everybody in it cooperating with the general goals. In our actual society, there are lots and lots of people who disagree with the general goals, or work towards pursuing different goals that not everyone agrees with. We try to form parameters for how far you can go in various directions and how to deal with people who go past the bounds. We're also generally open to the idea of that - some of those ideas and goals might be better than what we have, so it's good to let them be tried at a small scale so they can be observed and adopted more widely if they work well. We don't see much about how the Culture would deal with such things, mostly just some people and sub-societies that leave or declare themselves separate for various reasons.

Banks does explore these areas. Excession contains traitorous minds, minds created for single purposes (war) and humans who don't fit in the Culture ideal. I'm sure other culture books do too but Excession is the one I've reread most.

The "Perfect AI" was brought up in Look to Windward - the side-discussion in the novel was that cultures typically develop AI that reflect their norms. And the AI then interact with the culture over the millennia until they Sublime together. But build an AI without any of those norms, and they Sublime pretty quickly.

I think you’re misrepresenting the way AI acts in the Culture. They’re really just depicted as hyper-competent humans, essentially, with their own goals, quirks, and personalities. The reason The Culture works is because they’re self-policing: Banks depicts the AIs as having their own moral compasses, which do occasionally come into conflict, and in stories like Excession you see how the AIs form coalitions and deal with these conflicts. You also see AIs who don’t conform to their roles and are refitted, etc. Banks seems to believe in essentially universal moral principles that any sufficiently intelligent entity will have the capacity to reason out, and that there is a semi-inevitable progression towards a better understanding of and adherence to these principles as cultures develop (because cultures that don’t will destroy themselves). Or, at least, he believes that humans will successfully pass their own arbitrary moral principles on to AI; they are raised in our culture with our values, after all.

The one thing that Banks does that I really like is that he highlights the fact that sufficiently advanced AI is not just a tool or machine the way we traditionally think of them in relation to ourselves; as thinking beings they are every bit as deserving of dignity as ourselves. Actually, the truth regarding the Culture is that the humans are more or less pets, in the sense that it’s the AI’s benevolence that allows the Culture to function at all. What makes this notion uplifting rather than depressing is that Banks sees a society of super-intelligences as inevitably benevolent, but not trivially so.

> Feudalism with energy weapons makes no sense – a feudal society could not produce energy weapons, and energy weapons would undermine feudal social relations.

I do not follow at all. It is easy to imagine a powerful figure to maintain feudal order with help of energy weapons.

Feudalism is premised upon a ruling class providing their noble/warrior class with land holdings that they divide among a peasant class that labours, feeds and pays tithe to the noble/warrior and ruling classes in exchange for their land holdings.

If the peasant class can fight as effectively as the knights, then why would you distribute land to an intermediate group for redistribution?

You mean like the English at Agencourt? There is a reason the English Civil War happened in England (and not just the obvious). The world would have been a very different place if the Levellers had won [0].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers

Banks' main reasoning behind the social structure of the Culture is based on the idea that oppressive hierarchies become physically unfeasible in outer space. Without some sort of biological conditioning, it's practically impossible to oppress an entire section of civilisation for long since they can just live somewhere else in space. Space is inherently, physically suited to a kind of mutualistic anarchism. I think Banks has a vague outline of how the Culture formed from various subspecies which were escaping their indigenous power structures.

Of course, societies with milder hierarchies do reach similar technical prowess to the Culture. However, they are often missing that "edge" that allows them to progress faster or last longer than the Culture.

One of the sharpest "edges" is that the Minds really are trusted in the Culture. Other civilizations may have AIs that are very nearly the rival of the Minds, but they aren't allowed to make autonomous decisions. So the combat reaction time and planning of the Minds is always far better than anything with a biological decision-maker in the loop.

Thinking about that reminds me how slow the use of weapons is in Star Trek. The captain gives a verbal order to an officer who then has to physically manipulate a console to raise shields, fire phasers, or whatever. Hostile entities operating at machine-speeds should be able to go from "no signs of aggression" to "hull destroyed" before the captain can finish uttering his first sentence.

The Culture in general has technology roughly equal to Star Trek, with the key difference that Culture people aren't technophobic dullards. But if the people of Star Trek weren't technophobic dullards, they'd quickly become too different to be relatable for most watchers. So it's no wonder that "transporters can duplicate people, or even keep them alive forever" is just one more Trek plot-of-the-week that's soon forgotten, rather than a key element of Trek's future society.

Eh, arguably Star Trek has much less sophisticated technology than The Culture, especially when it comes to AI: remember, Data was very unique, and he’s absolutely nothing compared to a Mind.

In broad strokes: both have life independent from planetary surfaces, strong AI, FTL communications and travel, teleportation, and extremely cheap and abundant energy. The Federation has time travel over the Culture, but less impressive AI and comparatively abysmal biomedical technology. The latter two weaknesses are, IMO, more a result of extreme technological conservatism in the Federation than any universal technological ceiling being lower in the Trek setting.

In TNG we see that the computer can faithfully emulate human intelligences on the Holodeck, including human geniuses, while maintaining its "ordinary" ship duties as well. (At least I seem to recall Barclay consulting a virtual Einstein in the Holodeck when an alien probe turned Barclay into a supergenius in "The Nth Degree.")

So they've got strong AI for entertainment. And for medical care, according to Voyager. Run it faster than realtime and I'd guess it's already weakly superhuman, Data-or-better. Then keep iterating from there, like the Culture ancestors did for generations of AI before the full-fledged Minds came about. I'm not going to argue that Trek has anything close to Minds, but it seems like the Federation already has the ancestors of Minds, lacking mostly the willingness to let them develop further.

The even weirder question, when I keep thinking about it, is why none of the other major factions in Star Trek were less reactionary about e.g. ubiquitous AI or life extension. It seems like the Vulcans, Romulans, or somebody would have already been willing to end aging and/or adapt transporter technology to make immortal backups of individuals.

The Federation are basically space Amish that don't see their current technology as being advanced.

Starting in TNG, they literally fight technology incarnate to keep from losing their souls.

And who brought them to that fight? None other than a people with ultra-advanced technology who appeared to them as gods.

Interesting observation. My impression was different - they do not reject or fight technology itself - they just take it as common, uninteresting part of life, which makes sense if we assume that at their time, Federation technology got into highly evolved saturated state where it did not change much for decades. The real focus of TNG is on people, exploring the new places, human relations, prejudices, ethics, that kind of stuff. It is really about an optimistic vision of the future of the western society. The hi-tech environment greatest role was that it attracted geek viewers and made those difficult topics easier to get exposed to.

I came across this from Memory Alpha when I was trying to recall the details of how Trek replicators worked:

The idea of replicators was unpopular with the writers of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Ira Steven Behr commented: "I'd like to lose the replicators. They're my least favorite thing in Star Trek. A society that uses replicators is a doomed, finished society." (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion) Ronald D. Moore added that "Replicators are the worst thing ever. Destroys storytelling all the time. They mean there's no value to anything. Nothing has value in the universe if you can just replicate everything, so all that goes away. Nothing is unique; if you break something, you can just make another one. If something breaks on the ship, it's "Oh, no big deal, Geordie can just go down to engineering and make another doozywhatsit." Or they go to a planet and that planet needed something: "Oh, hey, let's make them what they need!" We just hated it and tried to forget about it as much as possible."

This makes me laugh and cringe at the same time. They were writing for broadcast TV, so they couldn't really dive in and embrace all the implications of Trek's technology. It would be too alien for most viewers. On the other hand, Behr's quote in particular sounds like the antipathy to replicators went beyond the professional pressures the writers were under. It sounds like the preaching of a proud reactionary.

I heard Banks talk once and one thing he said was that the key idea with AI is that it will be good.

Most of our stories about AI is that it will look at humanity and want to destroy it. He said that AI in the Culture will look at humanity and actually like it!

One problem that all cultures face is that of pecking order. Respecting the pecking order as animals gave us a lesser chance of death by violence within the species. But we've inherited the desire to rise up the status hierarchy and one of the commonest means of doing so is by trying to emulate the most successful. Unfortunately a high proportion of the most successful people appear to be sociopaths who seem to feed off of finding new ways to subtly weaken the culture as a whole.

They're kind of odd books because mostly their characters and plots are quite poor-- dull and badly written, and yet the world of the Culture stays with you because it's SO unique and SO well-crafted.

Excession is the one book in the series which I found to be EXTREMELY enjoyable, good characters and all.

Player of games is the only one I loved.

.. and would make an awesome movie if done right

I agree with aerovistae and I found the plot of Player of Games particularly weak. Watching the protagonist winning the game thing didn't feel satisfying. It's hard to get excited about a game you cannot understand because it isn't explained. And the big "surprise" regarding a certain character towards the end was lame. It surprised me, a little, only because it seemed too obvious so I expected something more clever. That said, I liked the book because of the Culture.

Excession is an outstanding book.

(But note to others: Consider Phlebas or Look to Windward are better starter books if you’ve not read any!)

Is there any story about the Culture from within? I mean, how do the billions, that are not involved in Contact, actually live? I suspect we would find that grossly disgusting, and it would destroy carefully constructed appeal of the whole civilization.

Actually your comment seems to me to be exactly describing the conflict between the Iridians and the Culture. Iridians would see the masses of people in the Culture as being grossly idle, wasted, no meaning, and themselves as having meaning, value, and good worth.

The article does pretty much say that the Culture can be grossly disgusting from the point of view outside.

To answer the question straight: people in the Culture live a life of leisure, they can do whatever, they can change their bodies at will and emotions, everything is a hobby.

This was one of the reasons I enjoyed Consider Phlebas. It's basically an outsider looking in (and in a very unfavourable and biased way).

There are plenty of descriptions of life inside The Culture; they essentially spend their time partying and finding increasingly complex ways to entertain themselves in an environment free of danger or responsibilities. Banks does depict plenty of members of the Culture as really shallow individuals, but their lives are not totally without conflict (largely emotional and intellectual), and there are plenty of people who decide they want to actually take on some sort of responsibility (like those who join contact), and people in the Culture are given that opportunity if they ask for it. One of the great things about the way Banks depicts the Culture is that within the bounds of the Culture’s morality people are free to live any way they choose, and even outside of those bounds they are free to form splinter groups that live differently (like the Zetetic Elench).

Right - no group "within the bunds of Culture morality" is described closely anywhere. Everything Banks writes about revolves around the Contact or the fringe groups or other civilizations. We are left to imagination as to "the homeland", and my imagination makes me wary.

Excession and Player of Games both have sections of the book that take place inside the Culture and show some of their day-to-day lives. They just don’t spend much time there because there’s relatively little interesting conflict to show.

None of the stories are completely about the Culture from within, but Look to Windward goes into a fair amount of detail about life in the Culture and Excession contains some details at the beginning of the story and in flashbacks to earlier in a character's life.

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