... 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.
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.
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.
That's _certainly_ not the case in Excession (I'm assuming that's the one you haven't read?)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Well okay; the humans aren't pets, they're emotional support animals. Not a huge improvement though.
I think family is a better metaphor. Families do provide emotional support as well.
The Minds have no reason to treat humans well. Humans have a powerful evolutionary motivation to treat their kin well.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.