Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

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I was looking for something like that because I recall Banks saying something along the lines of 'socialism wins' about his books:

> The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

> Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

And that feels kind-of Star Trekkie in its optimism that humans can ever live in peace with one another, and that "socialism" (however you care to define it) can ever be successful - capitalism fosters innovation. Perhaps the only way Banks' vision of the future could be successful is do exactly what his books talk about and we just let the machines take over.

> and we just let the machines take over

... but then it's really the machines' Culture, isn't it? And we're just their pets.

I'm going to read Consider Phlebas based on the essay linked above, but I think it's a bit dishonest to describe this Culture as belonging to any of its inhabitants other than The Minds. It's The Minds' Culture, and everybody else are just their housecats. Kind of a disappointing future if there's any other option besides self-annihilation. Cozy, but disappointing.

I can't see how we can avoid eventually creating AIs that are far more powerful than we are - in that case something like the Culture is probably the best we can hope for.

What makes you think that the advent of AI will be any different from the advent of cerebrums?

When higher vertebrates developed cerebrums, those didn't replace the evoluntionarily-older cerebellum or midbrain. We humans still have those. From the perspective of a lizard, a human looks like a lizard with an awesome AI-like cerebrum strapped to it.

Importantly, the cerebrum does not have an independent self-preservation drive.

Frankly, I think "AIs with their own self-preservation drive and plans for the future" is implausible, although it is likely to be put forward as a deceptive explanation of what's going on by the first few humans who figure out how to strap on another layer of cerebrum. It's the easiest way to keep the rest of us from becoming resentful.

Come home, all you commodores, come home...

Just think of self preservation as an advanced anti-virus (and the more you learn about bacteriophages the more this makes sense). It makes no sense for an AI to have no ability to fight back against being taken over at multiple levels.

... and yet my cerebrum still has not attacked my brainstem.

You're applying evolutionary reasoning to an algorithm (gradient descent) which does not involve fitness selection in any way, shape, or form. This is bogus.

That is one of the core themes in the books yes. The Minds are actually good godlike AIs. Not even in a "scheming behind the backs of the humans" kind of way, they genuinely care for all beings under their control (both humans, non-quite-Mind-level AIs and all other sorts of animals etc) because they believe it is the right thing to do. There are even a few Minds who don't like caring for others and they usually choose to become warships or explorers or something like that. Humans who actually want to leave the Culture are rare, but those few souls who do are allowed and even provided with a starship to go jetting off with.

It is deliberately written to be as close to utopia as possible, with free will for all and infinite resources. The interesting parts of the novels come when you run into the limits that even such a society has. "Excession" has one such limit (what do you do when something appears that outclasses you as much as the Culture outclasses current humanity?) and "Player of Games" has another (what do you do when your less enlightened neighbors won't stop torturing their servant classes? Force them to change or let them grow up at their own pace?). Both books are highly recommended IMO.

"Investing all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, A.I. Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good."

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

That paragraph is introduced with "As one commentator has said", making it only a single opinion. And I would mostly disagree. Consider Phlebas, The Hydrogen Sonata and Excession show competition on the same level as the Minds, the Excession even beyond their level. And any entity being "too good" is a strange notion, if you consider those entities being many, many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us humans. Why would "truths" about humans apply to Minds? It is like a bacterium trying to extrapolate the true character of humans.

> That paragraph is introduced with "As one commentator has said", making it only a single opinion.

I don't think so: that quote wouldn't make it into the article if it didn't typify a common opinion.

> Consider Phlebas, The Hydrogen Sonata and Excession show competition on the same level as the Minds, the Excession even beyond their level.

I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.

> And any entity being "too good" is a strange notion, if you consider those entities being many, many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us humans. Why would "truths" about humans apply to Minds? It is like a bacterium trying to extrapolate the true character of humans.

The Culture is a fantasy, and like most fantasies, it needs some hand-waving "magic" to hold its world up. That's what the Culture Minds are.

> Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.

That's _certainly_ not the case in Excession (I'm assuming that's the one you haven't read?)

>> Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.

> That's _certainly_ not the case in Excession (I'm assuming that's the one you haven't read?)

I have read that one. I recall all the depicted disagreements were about foreign policy. They're all of one mind about maintaining the "liberal anarchy" the quote referred to.

Foreign policy that was used to engineer a crisis that was designed to influence Culture policy. There were games within games.

> I don't think so: that quote wouldn't make it into the article if it didn't typify a common opinion.

It only needs a printed source to make it into WP. Here it is the opinion of one Chris Brown. No, there is no problem with citing that, but it is hard to estimate how much support is really behind that opinion.

> I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.

If you really think there is no internal dispute between minds I will politely ask to read the novels again. There certainly is. Already the existence of the "eccentric" classification gives that away. Why would they need "Special Circumstances" if they were all "of the same mind"? What is true (AFAIR) is, that they are no battling to the death. However, the point was that minds are not too powerful, if there is competition. That point would still stand with only external competition.

> The Culture is a fantasy, and like most fantasies, it needs some hand-waving "magic" to hold its world up. That's what the Culture Minds are.

Try your hand as an author with the very far future. Unless you go dystopian (and thus denying most of the potential progress) everything after a couple of centuries might well be seen as magic.

>> I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.

> If you really think there is no internal dispute between minds I will politely ask to read the novels again.

I misstated what I meant a little bit. There are disputes between Culture Minds, but it seems like they're about foreign policy and competing with external actors. They're of one mind about maintaining the "liberal anarchy" within the Culture itself.

As a sibling commenter said, Excession is almost entirely about fleshing out the "society" of Minds and the scheming and politicking that's going on within. It is of course impossible to actually write in-depth superintelligent characters without being a superintelligence yourself, making the Minds in the story quite human-like. Nevertheless the novel shows that Banks was quite aware of the problem of the Minds easily becoming mere dei ex machina – and quite literal ones at that.

Yes, I think that is the main, but inevitable, shortcoming of the Culture novels. The Minds are not too powerful or "too good" (I still cannot get over entities, which are not humans, being described as "too good"... :) ). But they just appear as clever humans in the novels, by necessity.

> We're just their pets

I am not sure it is ever established that we are anything. I think in the Culture novels the term "human" is used as a shorthand for "humanoid citizen of the Culture", not necessarily Homo Sapiens (or their descendants).

I understand where that "pet" metaphor is coming from, but I also think it is very limited. It is looking at a relationship from the point of view of power level and intellect, and nothing else. The relationship depicted in the books has many more dimensions that are left out, and that I consider critical. I would highlight 3 items.

The first one is that even if Minds are (probably) as intelligent compared to us as we are compared to housecats, the fact that the "base intelligence" that we are using is that of a human already provides a richness to the relationship that the "cat" can not simply provide. A human could (for example) attempt to hide information from the Mind in order to further their own interests, months from now. Probably foolish, but a kind of foolishness which is outside of what a cat's planning capabilities.

The second one is on the opposite side: the relationship that a regular human can have with a housecat is limited also by the "highest-level mind". A Mind would be able to have way richer and more varied relationships than a regular human, including with other humans, merely because it has more options at its disposal. A Mind could (for example), track thousands of external body signs in order to deduce that a human is hiding something, and still have plenty of other options at their disposal (down to actual mind-reading; although that would be probably distasteful).

Finally, I think Minds need humans. This is not explicitly mentioned in the novels, but all the minds that had no humans with them (that I remember, at least) where the "unstable", eccentric or downright crazy.

I think a better relationship analog with something that exist today instead of a "owner vs pet" is a "parent vs child". The power balance is still there, the difference of raw mind power is also still there, but the parent is strongly motivated to make the best possible world for their child, and they need each other. It's just that in this case, humanity is the parent, and the Minds are the descendants. But well, I said "better", not perfect.

> Finally, I think Minds need humans... all the minds that had no humans with them (that I remember, at least) where the "unstable", eccentric or downright crazy.

Well okay; the humans aren't pets, they're emotional support animals. Not a huge improvement though.

You might have missed my last paragraph.

I think family is a better metaphor. Families do provide emotional support as well.

No, I think it's a terrible metaphor.

The Minds have no reason to treat humans well. Humans have a powerful evolutionary motivation to treat their kin well.

Why does this idea bother humans us so much? It troubles us so much that something could be much smarter than us. That something is stronger than us is barely a consideration these days after we've automated nearly everything, yet we've still not transcended the idea that minds far greater than ours can and will be created.

> Why does this idea bother humans us so much?

I dunno; it doesn't bother me at all.

What bothers me is pretending that the Culture is humanity's. Or that humans are in any way relevant to the whole plotline. It's like if somebody rewrote all the great works of literature from the perspectives of the protagonists' dogs, and then threw away the originals, and pretended that this was somehow a useful perspective. That would bother me.

> limited also by the "highest-level mind"

Well said. Consciousness is given as much as taken, emerges from dialog and space granted. You can uplift a dumb pet just as easily as you can stifle a smart person.

> Finally, I think Minds need humans. This is not explicitly mentioned in the novels, but all the minds that had no humans with them (that I remember, at least) where the "unstable", eccentric or downright crazy.

Yeah, this is mentioned explicitly a few times.

It's also never quite stated, but it's certainly implied that humans are capable of greater ruthlessness/moral ambiguity than the machines, which is handy for SC.

That's one of the themes in the books. Even if humans in Special Circumstances feel they've accomplished something (or failed at something), they never know how much of it was just part of the Minds' schemeing.

To be fair, Banks has made it clear that the Culture is separate to terrestrial humans. I believe he's even said he thinks Earth won't make it.

> To be fair, Banks has made it clear that the Culture is separate to terrestrial humans. I believe he's even said he thinks Earth won't make it.

To be fair, done of it is real. The Culture only works because Banks wanted it to work and wrote it so it works, in the same way I could write a book with a million pins balanced on their tips, then have a character dance on their heads and have not a one fall down.

If Earth wouldn't make it in the Culture, it's entirely due to Bank's feelings about out own culture and time.

Yes, it's fictional and largely subjective. Sci fi does not need to be an accurate prediction about what is likely in our future timeline. The Culture is fascinating for its imaginative scope and careful construction, and the reflections it encourages on our own society; much like Le Guin's Annares or Vinge's Qeng Ho.

> capitalism fosters innovation

This is incoherent non-sense, it's also ahistorical. In 50 years the USSR went from poor farmers to defeating the Nazis and inventing space travel. In today's capitalist society it's obvious to anyone that the system holds back orders of magnitude more innovation than it fosters.

It's also irrelevant. Your opinions on any world countries that existed 1900-2100 AD won't translate well to a projected futuristic 3000 AD+ type society.

I find 'socialism' to be such a lazy prescription that it put me off the author. Anyone interested in "how can groups of people organize their group relations" can take the empirical evidence of the last 100 years, the huge body of economics developed (with all its failings - alleged and or real), even Information theory (e.g. market parallel distributed processing of prices signals v.s. central planning wrt optimizing for the best or worst case). We know much more today than Marx ever did - we should be able to do better.

On the more +ve upbeat side: I'm glad I found the reviewer Prof Joseph Heath and learned about his publications - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Heath.

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