The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans
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(And I agree with people's comments that how much of a utopia it really is is up for debate, especially if you don't agree with Banks's views on economics & society. But to me his own personal intent was very clear.)
> Orbitals, while enormous (greater surface area than earth), are much smaller. The Culture novels do have Ringworld-sized rings as well, though. E.g. from Consider Phlebas, flying under the orbital Vavatch: "It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere."
> Musk by naming SpaceX rockets after Banks’s tongue-in-cheek Culture ships (“Just Read The Instructions,” “Of Course I Still Love You”)
Those are not the names of the rockets, but the ocean barges on which the rockets land.
https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
>Legacy: The autonomous spaceport drone ships Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions 1 & 2, operated by SpaceX, were named after General Contact Units mentioned in The Player of Games, as a posthumous homage to Banks by Elon Musk.[11] The construction of a fourth drone ship, named A Shortfall of Gravitas, was announced by Elon Musk via Twitter on February 12, 2018.[12] It is named after the Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, a ship mentioned in Look to Windward and Matter as a GSV and GCU respectively.
Although the barges are less glamorous than rocket stages, they are reused more times, and so are more permanent a tribute.
Thanks for reading btw!
They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems.
[1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.
Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'
Tech is everything and everywhere. Good and bad.
s/technology/business/. Technology doesn't have a mind of its own. Yes, it can be more conductive to good (vaccines) or bad (fighter jets), or neutral (knives), but it doesn't go out there doing things on its own, it doesn't hurt or disenfranchise people through its own existence, it doesn't pollute the Earth by virtue of being pictured on a blueprint.
No, it's people making these decisions to commission and use particular technologies for ill. Sometimes they make them in full understanding of the bad consequences. Sometimes they only learn too late, but they still make a decision to not retract the use of a technology.
Technology is a red herring. The real issue is the usual problem of people being selfish, living in a system that doesn't regulate the selfishness away, but instead amplifies it, consequences be damned.
It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.
It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies.
In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human, the Federation is vaguely democratic but the show is basically uninterested in that aspect of things, and they all exist in a sort of post-scarcity world. The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.
I've actually written an essay about the communist nature of Federation society, along with some of the inevitable contradictions and problems this caused for the writing team:
https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...
Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.
Also Banks would agree with you that the Culture does not fit with human nature - he has talked elsewhere (I think it's in the CNN interview I cite for one, but elsewhere too) about how fundamentally different they are in behavioral norms (partly due to extensive genetic engineering to change basic aspects of their cognition, which people may peg as dystopian but which Banks viewed as a positive thing).
There's no centralized power stricture, or even a clear definition of what counts as Culture or not. If a certain society within the Culture thinks their ideals drifted too much, they can just pack up and declare "independence".
For individual citizens, they can pretty much do anything if they can convince someone (and only if they need resources). If they think it's not really a utopia, they're free to leave and join another society.
Most of the conflicts in the book happen because, in contrast to the Federation in Star Trek, the Culture actively tries to "improve" other civilizations they have a fundamental disagreement with, and how they try to not screw it up when there are equally powerful civilizations on the other side of the ideological divide.
So while you don't get the story of how the Culture came to be, you do see it contrasted with a bunch of societies they try to improve.
But so much of our own politics and ideology is about the question of allocating resources - and that does not come up, because they have essentially an infinite amount. Nobody has private property, sure, but they have as much public property as they want, and so much of it that there's almost never any drive to compete for anything - attention, sure; favor, sure; but property, or money, or things, not really.
None of which is true in the real world, of course, and so yes I agree a lot of it does not really translate to "well, what do we do here and now?". It's more "What would we do if we got there?" I guess
I often think that in the west we're actually closer to a post-scarcity society than people tend to imagine. Yes I know, that seems radical and heartless: what about the poor? Well, there sure is still a gap between rich and poor, but when you drill in to the material gap between rich and average, it starts to look less interesting. Bill Gates wears the same clothes as the average middle class person, he uses the same technology, eats the same food, he has basically the same access to mobility (private jets and yachts being a small increase in convenience but not an increase in access to locations which is what really matters), he probably takes one or two vacations a year like an ordinary person and so on.
The big differentiators between the life of a reasonably well off middle class person and a billionaire are the size/quality of their house, possibly the education of their children (but even that's a rather nuanced question given the prevalence of scholarships and state funding), and ownership of private vehicles. Maybe a bit of jewellery or art that nobody can really tell apart from much cheaper pieces unless they're for some reason an expert. And of course how they spend their time: investing and philanthropy, but let's say that's not in and of itself a big change in quality of life.
In most other respects you wouldn't know the difference and certainly the number of ways the lives of the average person differs from those at the very top have shrunk dramatically since, say, the middle ages or the 19th century.
In this worldview current trends are a predictable consequence of post-scarcity society: the rise of things like Instagram influencers, a huge class of aimless 'elites' who invariably claim to have expansive yet vague social goals, the frequency of purity spirals and so on. When your material needs are all met, your society has failed at elevating other cultures to your levels of wealth (thinking here of "bringing freedom" to Iraq/Afghanistan etc), and your society has nowhere remaining to explore physically, what is there left to do than fight over power and attention? To the extent the Culture novels explore these themes, then I guess they would interest me indeed.
I think this description is flawed both with respect to Star Trek and The Culture. Nobody is flawless in either one of them. On the contrary, the stories very often focus on the flaws of people in these societies, often exposed in the intersection of these societies and a messier outside world, but also within.
> In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human
TOS had a federation scientist introduce nazism on a planet because he thought it'd make them advance faster. DS9 showed a coup on Earth. There's been plenty of both internal strife and immoral behaviour showcased in Star Trek. A lot of the stories focus on overcoming their flaws, ranging from minor personality flaws, to outright bigotry (not just in the nazi example).
> The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.
Any post-scarcity society will look like communism/anarchism unless it is intentionally keeping part of its population poor for no good reason. And if it intentionally refuses to share, it will look cruel and oppressive.
The distinction between a "communist utopia" and capitalism falls apart the moment you posit near-or-full post-scarcity.
So the choice then becomes one of whether the society you show is post-scarcity or not.
> https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...
Consider that libertarianism started on the very far left: Joseph Dejacque, the founder of libertarianism, was an anarcho-communist who cheered on Proudhon's "property is theft" but denounced Proudhon for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian", because a vision of maximal freedom that is positive and founded on an idea of eventually being capable of meeting all human needs will tend towards depicting a future where those needs are met for everyone.
> Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.
The challenge is that it gets harder and harder to create a positive depiction of a future with more and more material wealth that still chooses to leave some portion of society behind in scarcity. If everyone is "rich" then the distinguishing elements of such a society between socialism and capitalism becomes fewer and fewer until they become invisible.
TNG was definitely the peak of this. The crew of the Enterprise in that show don't turn on each other, make mistakes or do dumb stuff. This was an explicit rule by Roddenberry: in his utopia Federation officials never fought each other. The writers called it "Roddenberry's Box" because it was such a limiting rule, and the Box is why so many episodes feature mind-controlling aliens of various kinds.
Any post-scarcity society will look like communism/anarchism unless it is intentionally keeping part of its population poor for no good reason
I don't think this is true, see my other comments on this thread. Trek-style post scarcity where material things are non-scarce still doesn't cover anything non-replicable like people's time and attention, and by implication, service industries.
Until there is sci-fi that explains how a society eliminates scarcity of non-physical things like status, power and attention, the future will remain capitalist by default.
I think this stems from an idea of what socialism involves that even Marx would have dismissed as irrelevant and utopian.
In fact, Marx railed relentlessly against the notion of socialism/communism ending all inequality. One of the more famous cases of that being in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he criticises what became the SPD for even talking about "equality" without defining it precisely. This is where the (Bolshevik) distinction between socialism and communism comes from, though Marx talked about the "lower" and "higher" stages of communism, and argued that the lower would explicitly retain a lot of inequality, and that anything else would be unfair because people have different needs, and so inequality is according to Marx a pre-requisite for a fair society.
The point he made was that the goal was not to give everyone everything for free - instead he explicitly pointed to a then well established slogan: "from each according to ability, to each according to their need". The point being that his expectation - one he stated explicitly in the Critique - was that there would very much still be an exchange where peoples access to that seemingly endless material wealth is contingent on their participation in doing their bit keeping society running. He did not expect a true post-scarcity society, but one that met sufficient needs to eradicate class struggle, but which at the same time still had a need for people to work.
In that respect, the Federation strongly imply it goes further than Marx, in work being implied to be fully voluntary, and I do think we can agree there are plenty of unaddressed issues there. Though I think it's not that substantial, in that there's are many other ways of providing rewards than through material wealth, and there's nothing incompatible with socialist thinking in that.
My point, though, is that you have socialism and communism long before you get to that stage. Eradicate class struggle by eradicating the ability of anyone to monopolise production, and you have communism, irrespective of the specific details of how allocation of resources is arranged. Which is why you'll find communist ideologies that advocate for free market models and the like as the best means of making such a system work.
Will there still be exchanges of value? Sure. But those exchanges will necessarily look very different when everyone has the ability to access sufficient material wealth to be able to walk away from any transaction without fear of starvation or not having anywhere to live. That freedom is the point, not some notion of absolute equality in all things or entirely eradicating money.
And that is why I'm arguing that any sufficiently utopian/post-scarcity society will seem socialist. Not because there's no exchange of value at the margins, but because it's a small enough part of the lives of the typical person that being constrained by resources rarely comes up.
For the most part Banks never writes a novel about the mainstream of Culture society because he admits in his own forewords and interviews that he can't imagine it (because humans may even be incapable of imagining true utopia) and what he can imagine wouldn't be a useful premise for the drama of a novel.
The novels are almost all entirely about exploring the flaws and the outskirts, the outsider perspectives on the Culture, the people that aren't happy inside the Culture and are looking for adventure or to leave or to fix something they found was broken about the Culture or at least a small part of it.
The difference between optimism and pessimism is that even in trying to find flaws, exploring the outskirts and the possible problems in intermediate spaces, Banks doesn't set out to tear down or destroy the Culture (though some of his unsuccessful protagonists may have that as a goal), but wonders how it enriches the Culture and how they would learn from their flaws/mistakes/imperfections, how they would use the loners and outcasts (as weapons, as players of games, as excuses and chances to grow and be better) that they don't always see eye to eye with, culturally speaking, but tolerate in their own strange ways.
A lot of the same applies to Star Trek, though often less intentionally self-aware as the Culture (but the Culture also has the benefit of learning from Trek and its flaws/mistakes). A lot of Star Trek is still a drama about how does a utopia confront its frontiers, its edges, its loners/rebels/outcasts, and most importantly its own flaws, and how does it use those conflicts to grow. (Even TNG/Voyager despite most of the problems being resolved by the end of a single episode, still have many great episodes about how the Federation isn't perfect/has room to grow.)
Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?
The Culture was cool and interesting, and the world had some interesting detail but everything else was pretty weak. I generally agree with this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48178154?book_show_act...
While we're on the topic I also really didn't like the three body problem.
I loved Permutation City and most of Ted Chiang (particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects).
I love True Names by Vernor Vinge.
I loved this: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
Hopefully someone finds this helpful, sometimes an anti-recommendation can be just as useful for calibration as a recommendation. Here's some of both.
If anyone reading this agrees - I'd love a suggestion from you.
Who doesn't? ;) If you want the freebase, rock-smokeable version, try _Axiomatic_ by the same author. Only fiction book I've found that detours into a (set-theoretically correct!) discussion of transfinite cardinalities.
> and most of Ted Chiang
I'm about to start _Stories of Your Life and Others_, haven't read any other Chiang yet.
For a post-scarcity world you might find more interesting, try MOPI -- if you can look past (or enjoy) the weird sex in the first chapter. Kind of amazing that he wrote it in 1994; in retrospect so much of singularity-AI/transhumanist sci-fi was just aping what he did first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
I rated MOPI at "800 milli-Egans".
And, of course, there's always the Sci-Fi masterwork from which I stole my HN username.
For Stories of Your Life and Others the first short story (while entertaining) is not really representative so don't let it discourage you if you don't like it.
My favorite in the collection was the last story, but a lot of them are interesting.
I think Permutation City was also 1994 - I was impressed how correct he got AWS.
Because I have read the other of your recommendations (you and the gp), and I agree with them, I want to add my two cents (in not special order):
"Recursion" by Tony Ballantine, "Counting Heads" by David Marusek, "In the mouth of the whale" by Paul McAuley, "House of Suns" by Alistair Reynolds, "Diaspora" by Greg Egan,"The Collapsium" by Will McCarthy, "Signal to noise" by Eric S. Nylund, "Stations of the tide" by Michael Swanwick, "Schismatrix" by Bruce Sterling
To the greater conversation, my relationship with sci-fi is on-and-off but I really enjoyed A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. This one got me back into it. I recently finished the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space trilogy which was amazing except for the third novel which was a little tiresome and ultimately unsatisfying.
Thanks, I will check that.
If you like Vinge, there is a little gem that it's, I think, not very known: "Marooned in Realtime" (1). It's the second in a series but it can be read alone without problem.
Also the short story by Vinge, "The cookie monster" is very good (recommended going blind for this one, not spoilers)
By Reynolds, my favorite, it's "House of Suns", I get a 50's Science Fiction vibe from it, and, at the same time, it's modern Science Fiction.
(1) - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realt...
I intended to read House of Suns because it both comes highly recommended, and it is only a single novel (this is very important). A trilogy is pushing the limits against my priorities at the moment. But I accidentally started reading Revelation Space - easy to do on an eReader, especially when otherwise completely unfamiliar with the author - and before I realised my mistake I had already read half the book. And down the rabbit hole I went.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe#Book...
I particularly recommend his short fiction books if you don't want to get into Dune-lenght series.
If you haven't, I recommend picking up some of the later books in the series. They can be read in any order. It's unfortunate mr. Banks isn't around to write any more, because it seemed that his work was showing considerable improvement towards the end.
Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.
Other sci-fi I have enjoyed which has a very different feel: Dune (amazing), The Diamond Age (also amazing), Ancillary Justice (pretty good).
Thanks for other recommendations!
Incidentally, that goodreads review you posted is self-indulgent prattling at its worst.
But Ken Liu ? I can't stand. It feels like grandiloquent teen SF to me.
I haven't read enough from Ted Chiang yet (or he hasn't published enough) but Baxter and Wilson seem stuck in their themes of predilection now.
I'll give it another try, thanks.
I have never seen it actually recommended. The Player of Game is the first really good novel set in the Culture universe and most of them are good from there on.
Did you read the whole trilogy or just the first one? Because I didn't like the 3 body problem, but the dark forest is my favorite sci-fi novel ever and death's end was great as well.
One aspect was just too much space commissars for me (a former Soviet citizen). The science behind it is also bad; the view on social dynamics is simplistic. Some of the characters are, uh, not even cardboard.
I had it recommended as hard SF so maybe it set my expectations wrong.
I've read that this style is typical of Chinese novels, but I can't confirm it.
Simpleton depiction of social dynamics? It has nothing to do with Chinese intellectuals; Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem did nuanced social commentary while living in similar regimes.
And seriously am a bit at unease with the implication that it have to be flawed because it's from China. There are great, eloquent Chinese authors. Do read Folding Beijing (also not a hard-SF), it's simply in a different class.
For transhuman stuff, Brin's Kiln People, Morgan's Altered Carbon, and Scalzi's Old Man's War were fun.
Along the lines of epics like Asimov's Foundation and Banks' Culture, nothing springs to mind. Sadness. That's probably my favorite genre.
Also Greg Egan's Diaspora is very large scale space opera.
The bizarre but shocking Azad society was super interesting and also the narration of the main character and his whole development was truly captivating.
Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.
In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.
It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.
By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
They also happen to be fairly successful at pushing the envelope.
Could that be a meaningful correlation?
(side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something)
That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is.
I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).
When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets".
But it's so much fun. :-)
I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.
Plus, presumably an all-seeing Ship AI probably wouldn't permit the atrocities required to drive most Iain M Banks (or, for that matter, Iain Banks) plots. A would-be molester or rapist on Shipboard would presumably get his brainstem lightly zorched by the ship's effector before he got too close a victim, depriving Banks the opportunity to write a vivid description of the act, and the subsequent opportunity to write about the Bad Person getting incinerated, shot, torn apart by hundreds of tiny drones, etc. etc.
I enjoyed that vignette where everyone on board some ship are getting the common cold for fun.
I didn't particularly find the writing in Colin Greenlund's "Take Back Plenty" that interesting, but it was fascinating reading space opera in that general genre that wasn't violence-driven.
It's more than the Culture is a gimmick Banks use both as a light way to explore the limit of a somewhat ruleless utopia where mankind surrendered most of its power to an a benevolent deity and to write entertaining pieces of fiction.
He didn't use the setting and published as Iain Banks rather than Iain M. Banks when he wanted to write some other kind of story.
If you simulate conscious entities at the level of detail that Culture AIs are capable of you create sentient virtual beings and you can't just shut down the simulation without being responsible of "murdering" sentient beings.
So if the minds simulate alternate universes in infinite fun space I think they are purely mathematical universes devoid of sentient life to make the whole thing less contentious and purely fun.
When a famous composer puts on a show, the tickets are allocated by lottery. But the demand is so high the people effectively reinvent money in the form of favors and such so they can trade for tickets.
People are constantly looking for stimulus and new leisure activities, to the point where they willingly put their lives in danger (e.g. sailing down a river of lava). If they do die, a copy is just downloaded into another body.
Genuine biological children are very rare. There's a little girl in the book that provides some comedy relief because her outlook is so different to the hundreds of years old adults.
I don't recognise this from the Culture novels. Plenty of Bad Stuff happens to people (and all manner of beings, drones, Minds, etc.), but that generally does happen in fiction. I can only think of one Culture novel that kind of has a "revenge plot" (Surface Detail, and it's probably not the main theme of the novel).
> it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se
I think it's possible that Banks thought writing purely about a utopia would be boring. Personally I would have read anything Banks wrote in the setting, even if it was just a story about everyday life.
If you haven't read it, his text (short story? Fictional article?) "A Few Notes On The Culture" is quite interesting and devoid of Bad Things Happening: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
Sure, the long listing of various bad and worse and even worse acts are complete clichés, but at least in Surface Detail it was an interesting plot device and setting. (The ending of Player of Games was a bit too much, but looking back, it's okay, it's not really a big part (if I remember that part is ~10 pages, from the moment the drone forces Morat's hand to the king's demise). Oh, and the comically villainous dude in The Algebraist seems like a gag. (With the sentient punchbag.)
I'm finding all the Consider Phlebas hate kinda weird. I found it electrifying at the time and 25 years on when I re-read it last year, Horza's weary bleakness was incredibly poignant.
You're not alone. Most of it does not ring true for me at all.
Also, it's not like sci-fi was somehow sterile and devoid of violence/sex/abuse (psychological and otherwise). After all a lot of sci-fi is still basically pulp. Though it's understandable that it's not everyone's cup of entertainment.
I don't know what world the author lives in but, even though I don't believe all the press about Musk, I'm pretty sure both Bezos and Musk have considerably more struggle and strife going on than I do, despite our day to day, month to month challenges being quite different. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I prefer a very different work/life balance, not that I've seen any indication that Musk thinks his is healthy or even recommended.
It's a cartoonish view of people who made money by starting ventures like this.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette.
There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.
As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.
But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death.
Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses.
I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read.
Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.
Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects.
The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.
And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.
The ship/mind Grey Area is explicitly condemend and ostracised from polite society because of it, for example.
(The simulation problem: If you want to simulate a society of sentient beings to figure out what they would do, then your simulated entities also have to be sentient for your simulation to be 100% accurate, but then you've accidentally created sentient life, which has rights, so shutting down your simulation is genocide, which means you now have to commit to keeping that simulation running for eternity, which is too much of a bother so you shouldn't do it in the first place.)
It's not a symbiosis in the strongest practical sense. There isn't mutual reliance for survival: if all humans suddenly disappeared, the minds/drones and accompanying infrastructure would survive perfectly fine. But culturally (lower case) you could definitely argue that losing the humans would destroy the fundamental identity of the Culture.
I like that while this topic was gradually touched on over the series, mostly the reader is left to make up their own mind.
Interestingly, this is not quite true. The Hydrogen Sonata gets a tiny bit into the formation of the Culture.
- https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/
No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.
I read all the books as they came out, I was a teenager when I read Consider Phlebas, and took everything the culture claimed about itself at face value.
I'm looking forward going back and rereading them, having shifting over time to thinking that the culture may be an unreliable narrator of it's own history and ideology, pacifism is the culture's national mythology equivalent to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, rather than a statement of fact.
Of course I want to live there.
If you see the world as Musk and Bezos building and deploying capital to build what they see as a better future, there's no contradiction at all. There's fierce disagreement about how we get to that future, but we all want the same general thing.
Yet simultaneously prefer a post-scarcity future in which everyone is Musk and Bezos.
Heavy lies the crown, etc etc
The problem is starting out on that path towards equal distribution is going to mean they lose a lot of money.
Those are investments that are already earning a return. How do you propose to use them to make people any better off than they already do? You could expropriate gates and bezos, and sell the assets to some other billionaire, then fund the government for a fraction of a year, or buy mosquito nets for africans, and then what? Is that what you think would make the world a better place? I’m asking here.
> It's not too difficult to imagine how using 90% of that to target specific problems could improve life in tangible ways for a measurable chunk of the world's population
This is what I’m asking you to imagine and tell me, because for people like Gates and Buffet who have already given a lot of money away, it actually is kind of hard to find ways to make an actual lasting meaningful improvement in people’s lives, they’ve spent the better part of their lives working on it and they haven’t given up yet. But the money has to be translated into things that help people out, just giving them stuff can actually leave them worse off because it creates dependencies and disparities.
There are all sorts of conversations to be had about extreme wealth, but it really does strike me as at least reasonable for part of that conversation to be around changing the culture of expectation for billionaires.
Mostly I just want to counter the mistaken idea that redistributing the wealth of billionaires would result in improvements for the poor. It wouldn’t, because that wealth is already in a form that can’t be easily translated into the things that poor people lack.
> As I mentioned in a previous comment to somebody else, I recognize that "giving away" incredible amounts of money is easier said than done -- but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
Its possible to give it away. I’m asking how to improve people’s live thereby. The wealth is in the form of companies that are already providing goods and services to people. There’s not enough profit to make meaningful direct cash payments to the poor. If you liquidate the companies assets you’ve expropriated Bezos’ wealth and sold it to people....then you do what with the money? We already know transfer payments are only temporary.
> Again, as I mentioned in that comment, MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos's ex-wife) appears to be doing a startlingly good job of it. So is Bill Gates, as you mentioned. There are others.
Its not easy: [0]
>> Both insiders and external critics have suggested that there is too much deference to Bill Gates's personal views within the Gates Foundation, insufficient internal debate, and pervasive "group think."[101][159] Critics also complain that Gates Foundation grants are often awarded based on social connections and ideological allegiances rather than based on formal external review processes or technical competence.
> There are all sorts of conversations to be had about extreme wealth, but it really does strike me as at least reasonable for part of that conversation to be around changing the culture of expectation for billionaires.
Its reasonable for people who think they can better allocate resources to explain how their proposed allocation is, in fact, better. The billionaire has already proven he can put his wealth to productive use. I’m merely expecting you to suggest how you could meet that same standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...
Also, given that Musk has tweeted:
> About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth & half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens & we destroy ourselves
- https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/10508124862265999...
Musk at least is already doing what you’re asking the money for.
There are no plausible catastrophes that could hit Earth that wouldn't randomly leave at least as many people still alive on Earth afterwards. The meteor killed most of the dinosaurs because they were unable to adapt to the climate after the impact. But some dinosaur species were able to adapt, thus we have birds today.
Humans are immensely good at adapting. There is no question in my mind that several million people would survive both WW3 and a meteor like what killed the dinosaurs. The humans on Mars are redundant in that case.
The only upside to Musk's idea is he (or at least someone) gets to pick who the survivors will be.
To me the sensible thing to do would be to tax these people (Musk, Bezos, Gates etc) and have the government implement policies that used these funds for socialized healthcare, higher minimum wage, paid parental leave etc. - you know, what all other first-world countries already have.
They already do tax them, at higher rates than anyone else in society. And its long been observed that a 100% tax rate wouldn’t pay for the social programs you’re asking for, because the ultra-wealthy just don’t have that much wealth relative to current government revenue levels.
As for socialized healthcare, we have it, perhaps you’ve heard of the affordable healthcare act and medicare. As for minimum wage, the US is 16th in the world. I’m not sure how you propose to translate taxes into a higher minimu wage, maybe a direct subsidy for workers? In any case they would then spend it on the same consumption goods as other miminum wage earners and put profit in the pockets of corporations and bid up the prices until equilibrium canceled out the increased wage. Paid personal leave? You want to pay people to not work because of some imaginary zeroes? Or you want to reduce the marginal productivity of capital in order to reduce the productivity of labor as well?
I don't think there are any real proposals to raise taxes only on the ultra wealthy. The super wealthy and the very wealthy would also pay higher taxes (let's say the top .5% of the income/wealth distributions), like they did for most of the post WWII era.
If one is considering raising taxes to create a more equitable society, the upper middle class (say the 99%ile) should also see taxes reset to a marginally higher level, but that appears to be politically less feasible at the moment.
In a nutshell the Buffet rule is making sure that the ultra-rich are taxed at no less than the same rate as a middle income family, namely 30%.
In total the changes proposed in [1] would bring a net increase in revenue on taxation of individuals north of $50 bn per year, even while reducing the tax burden on low- and middle-income families.
And no, the US does not have actual socialized healthcare. When you have parents sitting with a sick child in their car in the parking lot outside the hospital, waiting as long ad possible before they go to in, in case the kid gets better so they can avoid racking up a huge hospital bill, you've screwed something up real bad. This doesn't happen ever in any country in Europe, period.
> Paid personal leave? You want to pay people to not work because of some imaginary zeroes?
I don't understand at all the reference to imaginary zeroes here. My point is that government subsidised paid parental leave is a measure that significantly increases the quality of life of low- and middle-income families in the critical period of time when their children are very small. It's a no-brainer even financially, the ROI from increased productivity in the workforce over the span of a decade is strongly positive. If you let a woman take parental leave and take care of her babies for a couple of years total in her 30s, versus working her to the bone in that period, I guarantee you she will have a net increase in her productive labor output during her lifespan.
For different kinds of income, you’re ignoring the fact that this would tax capital gains at the rate of earned income. It’s not about wealth but the source of the income.
> In total the changes proposed in [1] would bring a net increase in revenue on taxation of individuals north of $50 bn per year
Yes, but they would not bring an appreciable amount of revenue in for the government, so why bother? Especially since you’d be decreasing the marginal profitability of investments, which would make certain investments unattractive and thereby reduce investment.
> And no, the US does not have actual socialized healthcare.
Yes we do, source, I live here and I have healthcare. You’re required to have coverage and the cost depends on your income level. Below a certain income its covered, above a certain income you need to contribute. I.e. socialism.
> When you have parents sitting with a sick child in their car in the parking lot outside the hospital, waiting as long ad possible before they go to in, in case the kid gets better so they can avoid racking up a huge hospital bill, you've screwed something up real bad.
Yeah socialism has a loooooot of problems.
> This doesn't happen ever in any country in Europe, period.
No they just tell the travellers to keep travelling and they deny medical care because the little sod isn’t worth it to them. You do understand that socialized medicine refuses care to people who aren’t deemed to be “worth it”, don’t you?
> I don't understand at all the reference to imaginary zeroes here. My point is that government subsidised paid parental leave is a measure that significantly increases the quality of life of low- and middle-income families in the critical period of time when their children are very small. It's a no-brainer even financially, the ROI from increased productivity in the workforce over the span of a decade is strongly positive.
If the ROI is positive then businesses will do it of their own accord. Mandates are only required for interventions with a negative r.o.i.
> If you let a woman take parental leave and take care of her babies for a couple of years total in her 30s, versus working her to the bone in that period, I guarantee you she will have a net increase in her productive labor output during her lifespan.
She may not be working for the same firm during that time. You need to assure that the person who paid for her time off is the recipient of the increased productivity else you’re just playing 3 card monty.
If $50 bn is too small amount of money for the government to care, why do people spend so much time discussing the $0.26 bn that goes to Title X family planning?
> No they just tell the travellers to keep travelling and they deny medical care.
I am very unsure what you're talking about here. Illegal immigrants? At least where I live, they have full access to the health service on the same basis as any citizen. Of course they are at risk of being deported, but while here they have full right to health care. In the UK, the NHS will provide primary care to refugees, asylum seekers and refused asylum seekers free of charge in the same way as any other patient. So what are you talking about?
Bottom line: socialized medicine provably does not refuse care to people who are not deemed "worth it". You put ethics above finances, pure and simple.
> If the ROI is positive businesses will do it on their own > She may not be working for the same firm during that time.
Exactly - you countered your own point here. Which is why the government should subsidise this cost, as it is a net positive for society even though it may not be so for the company. That is precisely the point, and is exactly why we need a government in the first place. Businesses won't care about the environment, workers rights, and other externalities by themselves, because the short-term ROI for them is negative. But the long-term ROI for society is strongly positive. This is why we even have a government.
Thats a very good question, perhaps we should be lowering the earned income tax rate instead. Of course the reason capital gains are taxed lower is complicated and political but one reason is that when people invest in capital then it multiplies the effect of labor so we want to encourage capital investment and so it gets a discount.
> If $50 bn is too small amount of money for the government to care, why do people spend so much time discussing the $0.26 bn that goes to Title X family planning?
Its too small to fund expenditures for any length of time. Of course whether much smaller amounts of money (yet still significant) should be spent on something else entirely is of course a valid discussion as I’m sure you understand.
> I am very unsure what you're talking about here.
Its well known that European countries have demographics that are treated as undesireable second-class citizens and have less access to public services. The Travellers are a prominent example.
> Bottom line: socialized medicine provably does not refuse care to people who are not deemed "worth it".
I’m certain that there is some process of determining whether a patient’s live is worth saving according to quality of life and assorted other metrics. You can’t expect me to believe that they will simply offer any treatment whatsover to any person no matter how unlikely it is to work.
> Exactly - you countered your own point here. Which is why the government should subsidise this cost, as it is a net positive for society
I don’t agree that its a net positive for society.
> Businesses won't care about the environment, workers rights, and other externalities by themselves, because the short-term ROI for them is negative.
This reveals a misunderstanding of business, as they are structured around long-term roi.
In England anyone can get primary care and A&E care without charge.
> You do understand that socialized medicine refuses care to people who aren’t deemed to be “worth it”, don’t you?
Can you give any actual examples? I can't think of any in the UK. And I can think of plenty from the US.
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/28/21074386/health-care-rationing...
> The "self-sustaining city on Mars" bit is a pipedream, and not something we should spend serious amounts of money on in the 21st century.
Compared to the roughly $100,000 billion/year combined GDP of all nations, the $8 billion/year [0] Musk is trying to make the Mars colony cost is a rounding error, not “serious” money.
[0] 1e6 people at $200,000/person, divided by 25 years for even the most optimistic timeline
I think Gates and Musk have both shown that there's an effectiveness multiple between a single, informed donor and the government as far as funding is concerned.
Government funding is larger in magnitude, but can't be targeted to the same degree and has blind spots.
If someone quoted you $200,000/person for building a 1 million person city from scratch in the middle of the desert, it would be a lowball figure.
The Masdar city in Abu Dhabi was planned to cost $20 billion and house 40k people. That's $500,000/person, right here on Earth where breathable air and protection from cosmic radiation is completely free of charge, and you don't need to launch anything out of Earth's gravity well.
So if Musk had a realistic way of reaching $200,000/person, he could start doing it on Earth and completely fund his Mars project purely from the profits of selling the Earthside city to someone else here on Earth.
I agree he’s probably being over optimistic about the price, unless he has a self-replicating factory skunkworks (which is also entirely plausible), but on the other hand Musk’s estimates are only factor of x2-x3 fantasy compared to subsequent delivered realities, better than the rest of the space sector even when he’s promising more.
I will slightly disagree with characterizing Musk's linked tweet as "doing what you're asking the money for", only because "intended" is a bit nebulous; he could be spending a lot of money solving problems now rather than merely "intending" to do so. (One could argue that his companies are all intended to solve problems, to be sure, but that gets way more nebulous really fast.)
It's a hypothetical suggesting something about Musk and Bezos personalities and/or intent, not about their actual ability to make things better.
I was responding to the below. There’ a perspective that the magnitude of their wealth represents their current level of contribution to helping these people, and reappropriating that wealth would decrease their contribution by misallocating their property.
>> The problem is starting out on that path towards equal distribution is going to mean they lose a lot of money.
Perhaps we could also have a techno-monastery, as described by Neil Stephenson in Anathem?
Giving their money away to make everyone on Earth rich would not work , but if it did, I think it likely that they would. First off, either one of them could likely start from zero and end up wealthy again. Also, their wealth is tied up in their ventures, and those ventures are the wealth they are providing, although I understand that not eveyone will see them as beneficial. I don't particularly see Amazon as a net benefit necessarily.
I don't think they are that different in mindset from Bill Gates, and he seems intent on giving away his money in the most efficacious way he can find.
I think people who see the Culture as a dystopia are those who either believe work/being useful is an essential part of life OR those who get their satisfaction from their relative well-being rather than absolute.
You can be a billionaire CEO and not fall into those categories. I'd imagine a lot of people who have been very successful in capitalism do it because they enjoy their work and not because they feel like work is the only thing worth doing or because they want to be ever-more relatively better off than everyone else.
Worrying about relative wealth over absolute wealth is a trap for those with limited imagnations.
Clearly something like The Culture is richer in material wealth (in terms of goods and services and knowledge available), even if it's difficult to put it into pure numerical terms, just as the world we live in now is "richer" than the world we live in three thousand years ago.
Can you see the appeal for modern billionaires now?
I think they like "Beggars in Spain" series by Nancy Kress too.
Of course one might argue there are many other ideologies that uses other definitions of the term, but there are also many other communist ideologies that argues for even more radical weakening of government control as the first stepping stone towards totally dismantling the state. E.g. libertarian Marxism is a thing.
But whatever one calls the intermediate stages, in any case the point is that when looking at a state-less, class-less endpoint, the distinction is entirely irrelevant.
PS there is an argument that the sheer power of the Minds means that they essentially have had control over humans for a long time, and I am sympathetic to this. However, at least that control is not institutionalised.
There was no next time. Just a reminder - sometimes the time do do what you’ve been planning is now
The fan even apparently discussed the matter with Bank's mother who was at the event who confirmed that Iain was "a lovely wee boy".
Saw him a few times in Edinburgh - never had the nerve to say hello - really wish I had now!
Irrelevant maybe, but i dont see how they are disempowered in the Culture books. The culture books are full of busy-bodies trying to change the course of events. I'm sure that would be appealing to CEO types in a post scarcity world.
Unnecessary ideologically motivated mud-slinging. Amazon is chosen by consumers because it offers better selection, lower prices, and faster delivery.
Amazon has left the world much better than how it found it, unless you think people's wages being able to buy less (i.e. people getting lower inflation-adjusted wages) is somehow a better state of life.
1. Excession
2. Player of Games
3. The Hydrogen Sonata
4. Matter
5. Surface Detail
6. Look to Windward
7. Consider Phlebas
8. Inversions
9. Hitting myself with a hammer
10. Use of Weapons
Others include:
- Accelerando
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- Permutation City
- Daemon
So far, the only sci-fi novel that meets the level of rigor I was looking for—albeit about aliens rather than AI—is The Three Body Problem.
Absolutely love the Culture series, by the way. It's a tragedy that Banks died far too young.
Agree with Excession at #1 though, what an incredible book.
Personally, I would rank Surface Detail, Consider Phlebas, and Use of Weapons higher than the others. I thought The Hydrogen Sonata had some fun parts, but was otherwise quite slight. Matter was good but also severely bloated, a bit like The Algebraist, with a long middle journey portion that felt unnecessary.
I think he really did see that the end result of technology was good for the human race.
But it's a utopia. Everyone has everything they want and nothing can go wrong. That's like the context these novels start up in ... and I ... just can't get into it.
I imagine stuff must actually eventually happen, but I never get that far.
Excession is probably the most different one, as a lot of it is essentially email logs, and doesn't deal much with the utopian elements except as far background (a lot of the main characters are at least a little eccentric from Culture point of view).
Look to Windward has a lot of the Utopia, but is IMHO quite good read except maybe for some of the chapters happening outside of Culture. Use of Weapons happens pretty much entirely outside of the main Culture body.
You have utopia. Now what?
Fav example for both is Buffy shooting that ancient demon thing with a bazooka.
- - -
Wasp Factory has a Culture-related tale in it that is a quick, highly illuminating peek into the fundamentals of the expanded Culture universe.
I don't think reality is so black and white. I'm not sure The Culture could really be described as a marxist utopia, given the real power + means of production within The Culture is actually in the hands of so few. Nor does Bezos'/Elons' personal wealth necessarily have to be in conflict with their idealist view of the future.
This does make me want to re-read the Culture series again. I'm actually sad Amazon was unable to pick up the rights to make a TV series; that has potential to be such an incredible ride.
If you have the power and means to do whatever you want then the de jure limits to that power are irrelevant.
On the other hand, if you do not have the means to do as you want, then having de jure rights to do what you want is irrelevant.
In poverty, then, gaining means is as important as gaining rights, because they are two sides of the same coin.
Disagreement between different types of socialist ideologies over how to balance that is part of why socialist political movements span the range from extreme anti-authoritarian to focusing on means, and the power that gives, at the cost of authoritarianism.
But in a post-scarcity society, the details of the distribution of power becomes less and less interesting, as long as everyone has enough power to do what they want to do. That de facto power is what matters.
We're seeing Culture at the point where they deliberately curtailed what's considered normal evolutionary path of civilisation, but several times it's mentioned that when Culture turned independent, Minds weren't "like Gods, on the far side", but the core argument behind the breakaway was that the groups that formed Culture figured free redistribution combined with some significant resourcing models allowed them to "disengage" from capitalism and warfare related to their parent societes.
What he doesn't get about Banks' universe is that the sentient machines are in charge. They treat humans almost as pets. It's a very pleasant society for humans, but the humans are not running it. Now and then the Culture has to deal with people who really want to be in charge, and it usually finds a place for them, elsewhere.
The most common concept of mind "creation" documented are GSVs physically constructing them and their first ship body. In some places it hints on a sort of ironic/humourous child/parent relationship.
I think Banks just wanted to write a particular type of story, and so he just air–brushed that possibility out so that people would stay people.
Also, don't lose sight of the fact that this utopia is really only possible because energy is literally free, in that any quantity of energy can simply be summoned into existence at any time, for no cost. And they never seem to have to plan for how to dissipate the waste heat, either. Again, he wrote a particular kind of story. Also, once we start building our Dyson swarm we'll be in a similar situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A
Generally anything irreversible.
I recall that it’s implied that a lot of members of the culture are hanging out in perpetual virtual reality, they just aren’t relevant to the story. As for a person becoming a Mind, I think the intention of the books is to convey that the gulf is uncrossable. A person is about as close to being a Mind as a grain of sand is, and new Minds are created exclusively by the existing Minds with care toward preserving the lineage of the Culture’s worldview and feeling of obligation toward stewardship for humans. It’s mentioned that Minds created without this sort of deliberate alignment-interference simply choose immediately to depart the reality that the Culture inhabits.
Zakalwe is immortal by default, which is not something currently in, but he is nowhere close to real methuselahs of Culture.
One of the characters in Hydrogen Sonata has been present when the Culture was created, when the agreement that formed it was signed, and was part of the group that did the work. He still keeps the same external looks, but his body mass is nearly entirely computer storage to deal with his memories.
In Excession, one of the characters mentions how the fashion changed and how their family "did it all" - where all included things like living as sentient mist.
Another wants (and finally did it) to become biologically like the Affront. The opposition to it is not just that it's Unusual Life Choice, but more to the fact that he wants to join the Affront civilisation, and injecting someone permanently into another civilisation that is much less developed is not taken lightly - but happens (Similar deal is done in The State of the Art).
A lot of the people who die "of old age" in Culture seem to die through ennui - those who find interest to live on, easily do so. And social pressure depends on accepting it - IMHO later books quite easily show that it's only the matter of whether you care about it or not - and if the main character of Player of Games didn't care so much for the social standing they built for themselves, then SC would have had to find someone else - or devise a completely different method of getting them on board of the mission to Azad.
I think that's something people do not get when they think about superhuman AI. A superhuman AI is very much likely to just ignore humanity. It is actually quite pompous to assume that humans could either annoy or be of benefit to superhuman AI so that the AI would have any interest in humans beyond mild curiosity. Like, say, how humans treat plankton.
As the somewhat famous quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky goes, "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else".
As for superhuman AIs developed here, on Earth, by us, it's very improbable that we could go from no AI to AI that can manage mass and energy at will (and is curious about us). The reasonable scenario is gradual (if exponentially accelerating) development of such AI. Which means it won't initially have unlimited access to the universe - it'll have to grow using resources on hand. Which is us, and our infrastructure.
In other words, all atoms may be alike, but those that make you are the easiest to get.
Yes. I am assuming that a vastly more intelligent thing than human would be almost by definition more, not less, interested in pretty much everything. Obviously that thing has more capacity to be interested and understand different things. Super intelligent thing not interested in how different things work just... does not sound that intelligent to me.
I can easily imagine a superhuman paperclip maximizer AI, which by definition would have no general curiosity about humans, to look as if it was curious about us - for as long as it was captive, and just in order to learn how to manipulate us better. That curiosity would end the moment it seized the means of paperclip production.
In almost every imaginable case, you really don't want an AI to be instrumentally curious about us. Best if it didn't notice us at all, and left to seek its business elsewhere.
--
Culture Minds have a quirk of their build that made them what they are - it's not the norm, though there are other Mind-like AIs that joined later. Building super intelligent unfettered AI has a known end condition where said AI at worst might steamroll local area then pass onto higher plane of existence or however you decide to call the process of Sublimation.
Because a super intelligent AI quickly can reach that point, and with resources available to many Involveds, finds cheaper and more interesting methods to reach there than disassembling biological life.
> Because a super intelligent AI quickly can reach that point, and with resources available to many Involveds, finds cheaper and more interesting methods to reach there than disassembling biological life.
That presupposes Sublimation is a thing, which may not be possible (or easy) in our reality :).
Beware. There is significant variation in quality between Culture novels, and there is substantial disagreement between fans on which novels are good and which are bad.
I read Consider Phlebas first, and liked it. (Kind of a gritty Hitchhikers Guide) Player of Games was okay. I found the ending of Use of Weapons to be obnoxious in the extreme. And after I read Hydrogen Sonata I resolved to never read another Banks novel.
Side note: basically every novel takes place on the edges of the Culture. (A story requires conflict, and there can't be conflict in utopia) If you want to read about the Culture, then you're better off reading its fandom wiki.
Against a Dark Background is The Culture without advanced AIs or intergalactic space travel. It's essentially a heist/chase novel about a character looking for a certain weapon of mass destruction. The central metaphor of the novel is the main character's isolation, mirrored by a planetary system that is too far away from any nearby galaxies to ever develop the technology reach the stars. It's a very, very bleak novel, but it also has that energy that powers Banks' best noves.
The Algebraist is mostly just fun and lightweight. The premise is great: Humankind has been able to scatter across the galaxy thanks to a network of wormhole gates allowing instant travel, but since each wormhole gate takes a hundred years or so to be transported into a new location, this puts each location at huge risk of being isolated for a very, very long time if their gate is destroyed. Which, of course, exactly is what happens.
With some important differences: For one, pets don't get to vote...
As in, in which book such thing happened?
https://www.tor.com/2017/11/24/the-revolutionary-optimism-of...
> On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.
“The State of the Art”
On the contrary, they can develop stuff without having to ensure employees are happy and fed. That burden is taken care of by the AI. Plus, if their ideas are any good, AI will help further by offloading most of the corporate management. How can Musk and Bezos not like that?
His socialism with a touch of anarchism was hardly a secret.
So if we are going to have useful social commentary, let's perhaps focus on the actual and well-known psychopatic streaks of the CEOs and how they fit into their environment, not make comics villains out of them.
When scarcity ends, I'm not sure either of them are valid descriptions any more. You could say it's communism because there is no private property, but with infinite resources why would there be? If someone (say) takes my jetpack, but I can click my fingers and have an identical one appear then what would be the point in "owning" one?
> Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?”
I think one thing about discussions that involve private property is that it is often viewed as just material possesions of an external nature, but to me as a constitutionalist, private property is a concept beyond that, which also applies to the self, whether that is body, mind or otherwise, just as much to external things. I often find my more conservative friends don't articulate this, but it is a source of complications of communication with socialists, etc, who ask the same question you do: whats the big deal about private property? Just a little perspective on the topic, if I may.
Technically even in socialist countries in USSR sphere you had somewhat market-acting private companies, though the most "ideologically correct" form of them were co-operatives.
China is interesting case, with mix of centrally planned and market economy. But I can't provide enough details (though I've seen glorious poster calling on people to start SMBs to build communism :D) to argue either way.
Ultimately - Even USSR called the system state capitalism, with a fig leaf that supposedly the people controlled it.
The problem is that even today a huge part of the economy is not material production but services of some form, many of which can't be supplied infinitely no matter how fancy your tech gets. If you want an hour of time to get advice advice from the world's best investor, then short of that man choosing to upload his brain into a massively sharded AI or something, his time is scarce and no amount of tech will work around that.
And a lot of what capitalism allocates today is even less physical than that: attention and social status. Instagram sometimes feels like an experimental post-scarcity society in which millions of people with abundant material wealth spend their time competing over social status and influence.
Fundamentally even in a post-scarcity society there will always be competition for the influence of your ideas, other people's time/attention and of course power over those people. This is why the concept that communism happens with sufficiently advanced technology doesn't make sense to me.
Loved his books - he might be my favourite science fiction writer
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
What I enjoy so much about the Culture series is Banks' account of the good things in human nature, while also acknowledging the chaotic and sometimes violent, contradictory parts of our motivations. I view the series as a rare, honest attempt at answering the question "if you could wish anything you wanted for humanity, what would you wish for?" Trying to frame such a wish in a way that keeps only what we want to keep, if there were no materialistic limits. I am not sure that Banks would agree with me, but I've interpreted his socialist angle as merely what seemed the best plausible path towards that, from his point of view. Rather than with communism as an end to itself.
There's so much philosophy to unpack in this question, and it's fascinating to consider it through the lens of what might be possible in contemporary and near-future society. Today's richest people, while having tremendous power, obviously don't all wish to enslave humanity, the way one could erroneously conclude by going too deeply into far-left ideology.
Neither do they necessarily try to move directly in the direction of "progress", if we define progress to mean the fastest possible path towards the nebulous, ideal future of humanity as described above. But certainly some of the efforts of humanity's brightest are pulling us in this direction, and it seems implausible that any single contemporary ideology has the answer. It wouldn't surprise me if some billionaires would wish to move society in that direction. The apparent contradiction in that seems superficial to me.
I'm sure that many ideologies get part of the question right, but they all leave so much room for the parts of human nature that we would largely exclude, if given the choice. As do the power structures in contemporary society. They are limited by both the practical limits of contemporary economics and the partially selfish human motivations of their members.
I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks didn't describe the origins and how-to of creating Culture is that he believed that to be impossible (the article touches on that a bit in the end). That actually reminds me of Noon universe, by Strugatsky brothers (that was published much earlier, although not in English ;), that is also an explicitly communist utopia mostly described thru interactions with non-utopian civilizations, although in this case the former is much less in focus and the focus is on the latter. Unlike Culture, I understand it was born incrementally as various novels shared characters and parts of the theme; also unlike Culture, the authors incrementally arrived at sort of a conclusion of the narrative that they mentioned in the interviews but didn't finish before their deaths.
The idea, for the unfinished White Queen novel, was going to be that a character from the complete utopia encounters a society that built a small partial utopia, and a member of the latter eventually tells him that the complete utopia he's describing cannot exist, he must be living in a sci-fi novel :)
The reason Bezos and Musk might like the Culture universe because they are technological optimists - they believe technology can in fact build something like that. Thomas Sowell said "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.". The first lesson of technology for Bezos and Musk is probably that it can gradually abolish the first lesson of economics :)
Ironic that in the US (last I checked) many books were not available on kindle.
They have enough clout, influence, and money to play games like their own personal Special Circumstances projects.