The Culture novels as a dystopia
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And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.
So that means you're getting a glimpse of the culture only in the same sense that a James Bond movie tells you about England.
You'd like to think you're seeing Tinker Tailor but you're seeing James Bond. This is a dramatisation of an edge case.
We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.
And so fanfic exists.
Was The State of the Art SC? Been a while since I read it.
Presumably the Arbitrary is just an ordinary contact ship, but Diziet is definitely not an "ordinary" member of contact. She's the one who recruited the guy in Use of Weapons, the one whose name is not actually Zakalwe.
It would be more interesting for dogs to read stories about dogs being taken for a walk than about those dozing on the couch in the sun or eating from a full bowl.
CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?
Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/15/iain.banks/ind...
(Also most of the afterlives on offer don't seem particularly attractive.)
As someone who doesn't believe and never has believed that there was an afterlife, there is something kind of horrifying about the _inescapable, eternal_ nature of such a thing. I think this may be different if it's a concept that you've been sold on as a kid, but from the outside, it's really kind of unsettling.
They could have "picked" another moment. It might be next New Year or a moment in the past or even a moment before they were born. The moment of death is simply the "earliest convenience" to end unwanted existence.
[1,000,000,000,000 years]: Hiddleston ceases physical activity, as no experience is able to provide him with new stimuli.
Sci-Fi is full of 'Utopias' that can also be viewed as 'Dystopia', depending on the view point. And in a lot of movies, that shifting view point is the story.
Idk, post-scarcity immortal FTL-wielding techno-democracy with benevolent artificial superintelligence doesn’t strike me as some hell.
And the Culture isn’t a galactic monolith. If you want a more traditional existence, there are other societies you can fuck off to.
I got no indication that Sublimation was a marker of advancement. More just a different state.
I'd go and live as a culture citizen in a heartbeat.
Perhaps, anyone who considers The Culture universe to be hell thinks incomprehensibly different to me.
Read another book of his and you'd think he was a communist, another an anarchist, et cetera.
He liked to explore ideas. If there's one thing that's reasonably consistent across his work, it's his belief in individual agency.
Even though there's a good amount of utopia-description in the novels, I'd still be wary about extrapolating too much from what are primarily stories of exceptions.
(One might suggest, in response to TFA's expectation there'd be more arseholes in the Culture, that one of the most important things a utopian Culture would ensure is a robust education for all its citizens -- but I realise some popular contemporary earth-bound cultures may take that as a subtle dig.)
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
I'd rate the Eschaton series by Charlie Stross (sadly only two books ever published in that series, and it's unlikely we'll ever see a third) - Singularity Sky & Iron Sunrise - in this category.
I think Accelerando might fit, too.
Neal Asher did pretty well with his Polity universe. Besides AIs with some capacity for playful violence (Agent Cormac thread, but always there), we also get crablike aliens (the Prador war) and very weird biology (in particular the Spatterjay water world).
By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias. It's more that writing convincing utopias is hard and people are lazy.
I put forward thus that in the same way Superman can be tedious so can Utopias, and Utopias can be interesting in the same way that Superman can.
It’s tedious to a modern audience. Hemingway but in space isn’t really an improvement. (The closest we have is Ted Chiang.)
Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:
"[he] would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"
Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.
They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.
Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.
a constant hedonic self modification and individual reinvention is obviously no sign of extreme change but the opposite, banality and powerlessness. As Augusto de Noce used to point out about the sexual revolution of the 60s, the sexual dimension became an obsession precisely because all other revolutions had been rendered impossible by an atomized society. There was nothing radical at all in it.
It's no accident that the Culture puts so much emphasis, and in that it reads ironically enough like satire of modern consumer society, on choice only at a level of reshuffling your sexual organs or bodily characteristics. The minds in the culture are by no means just a sort of voting mechanism that summarize the attitudes of the population of the Culture. They control the culture which we even get to learn in the books in the series that delve into the minds as characters.
"Only"?
For the specific case of Banks, Yudkowsky has some interesting ideas about why it fails. [0]
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwnSPgwtmLjvTK2Wa/amputation...
When The Culture voted on the Idirian War, the Peace faction splintered from The Culture. Other groups seceded (or join all the time), such as the AhForgetIt Tendency and the Zetetic Elench.
Rebellion exists only in the framework of an oppresive power structure, where you can't just leave if you want.
So according to your definition the Culture is not a utopia.
The original blueprint - Thomas More's book - made the New England Puritans look like a wild bunch. Phalansteries and communal dining, oh my.
In Player of Games we see a corner of a gaming culture which partly meets this criterion but it does not have meaningful consequences outside the gaming participants (unless you count the ways the Minds use it to manipulate Gurgeh).
Maybe by this criterion utopias are impossible, since the disruption caused by exciting activities with consequences conflict too much with the optimality of the society. But I don't think anyone now can prove this would be the case.
I think adventure necessarily happens at the edges of civilization and order, or when civilization or order breaks down, and to a reader I think there must be some kind of adventure for story to be fun.
So what you'd see in a true utopia might be very fun for the people living in it, but there might not be much conflict that would appeal to a reader. Utopia conflict situations might be things like "Ethics board analyzes the legality of using state funds for man with Down's Syndrome who wants to try an experimental treatment and must analyze whether he understands well enough for informed consent". You can write it, if it were really good I could imagine wanting to read it, but it's much easier to read a story where people are shooting one another.
There are some _very_ interesting examples in John C. Wright's Count to the Eschaton sequence.
Side note, my homelabs Kube cluster's naming scheme is AI from fiction. Rhadamanthus is one of the computers from Golden Oecumene, a powerful manor computer. Also in the cluster: Jarvis (Iron Man), Cohen (Spin State), Epicac (eponymous Vonnegut short story).
I wanted to - and still do - side-step spoilers, so I'll concede an error, and bump it back up my TB(r)R list.
So you still have freedom of self...just not much power to shape your civilization. Most of us don't have that anyway and at some level I think I'd be ok giving that up to a group of super intelligences so I can spend more time doing the things I enjoy.
In fact they do. Humans can call a vote on anything in The Culture - I would have to re-read some books to provide sources, but it was mentioned that sometimes it was about very trivial things, and sometimes more important. Mostly though, the humans were content to let the Minds do all the maintenance.
And yes, I do think I recall reading that some Minds are in fact made of previously-humanoid beings. Sometimes entire crews of them, if I recall correctly!
I think letting humans vote on some small things may be the equivalent of letting your dog choose which direction to go. It's a decision, but ultimately useless in the grand scheme of things. The minds may be an even greater cognitive leap from us than the difference between us and dogs. They can easily give the illusion of choice without relinquishing any real control. This is all speculation of course.
But on a smaller scale, the (still billions of) beings on, say, an Orbital can have a much greater effect on things. But again, they don't often choose to, opting to let the Minds run things. And, given that the Minds are sentient beings and citizens of The Culture as well as the humans, this is more or less the same as our current delegation of decision-making to politicians. Of course there's much to be said about doing that presently, but I think it's a given that at least the Minds are not incompetent, which can't always be said about our current politicians :P
And do keep in mind that it's not "letting" humans vote on "small things" - they have the right to vote on any matter they want, big or small, and as far as my reading goes, the Minds would respect that.
Nor does it imply that Sublimed civilizations are somehow more of an utopia. They are clearly more capable, but in terms of social organization, again, Chelgrians are a strong counter-example where the Sublimed part of the race literally demands the rest of it to commit genocide as a form of revenge to get access to heaven.
Anyway Subliming is the only aspect of The Culture series I did not enjoy. Much too handwavey for my liking. Still, made for some interesting stories.
In Excession main gimmick is an object (possibly unrelated to subliming) that immediately puts on alert all civilizations at Culture level of capability (and below) because it's something new in the universe, something that could help bump out of local technological minimum that the Culture currently occupies and exceed its potential in a different way than subliming, that is well known, but mostly one way road out (and very out).
I got thinking about this aspect of Culture starting with a broader premise - are there works where humans arrive at higher levels of human-embedded intelligence as a species or in a more limited scope as individuals? While describing higher levels of intelligence may be impossible, I find it curious science fiction doesn't appear to have too many attempts at that. Some of Vernor Vinge's works come to mind, but even there humans appear to be about the same as at present.
That wasn't a Culture novel; it was in The Algebraist, and that society was almost an anti-Culture (highly hierarchical, quasi-capitalist, religious, racist/speciesist).
> novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me
> that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.
It's not clear to me that reading the Culture series as an "ambiguous" utopia is counter to the intended reading. There is a multitude of instances in the books that show clearly the downsides of living in a utopia where every possible want is met. The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories. In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something. In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
> In Excession, it’s explained that Minds do rarely drift far enough to go rogue
> and are destroyed by the Culture. In other words, these superhuman minds have
> not solved alignment, and they cannot/will not inspect each other to determine
> misalignment before malicious action is taken.
The Culture doesn't even seem very interested in dealing with minds that do go rogue. In the same novel - Excession -, the GSV Grey Area openly violates Culture ethics, and nobody (or noship) seems to feel compelled to do anything about it.
You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.
Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
the grey area/meat fucker was a small, uncrewed, and demilitarized(?) ship/Mind that, while morally repugnant to the culture's sensibilities (or at least most other Minds'), no one considered significant/dangerous enough to give the same treatment
I mean, I'll sometimes take a mild poison for fun, too (that's what alcohol is). I don't think, in a circumstance where you could just have it go away when you're bored of it, that recreational common cold thing is _that_ weird.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
A little under a thousand people attempt to climb Mount Everest every year. About 3% of them die while doing this. That's way, _way_ worse odds than the lava rafting people were getting. It's just an extreme sport. And, like, presumably it was a minority interest, just as dying halfway up a mountain is today; most people would not be lava rafting.
I do feel the writer is missing one important aspect though: self-governance and having the decisions of humans matter. Horza Gobulchul was right. By relying on machines to do our decisions for us and having them take control of society, we lose a large part of what makes us human.
Whether the culture stories set later also have referers like Fal involved is unclear.
* autonomy
* internal (mental) sovereigneity
* some degree of legibility to other human persons (e.g. a name, capacity to enter social games, a consistent personal history)
* a tolerance for information throughput within the normal distribution of human persons
The Culture abandons 1 and maybe 2, while the VO from Accelerando abandon 4. I've never seen any proof that the universe is privileged to permit all four to coexist indefinitely under conditions of social acceleration.
I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
A more grounded criticism, however, is that in the modern world the range of lifestyles and careers available to most free adults is circumscribed only by their wealth, health, the laws of nature and the ability of other humans to enforce prohibitions. Competition from existing political units already exists, but nobody has it guaranteed that if they formed a new polity it would merely be a kayfabe contained inside one or more existing states.
(I think the Culture doing this is a good thing, incidentally, but it does count as removing #1.)
>> * autonomy
>> * internal (mental) [sovereignty]
> I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do.
> I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
No. I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.
So they try their best to preserve the illusion of 1 and 2, while doing away with them as much as possible.
You read that in Consider Phlebas, where the anti-Culture protagonist claimed it. You’ve fallen for propaganda in a work of fiction.
I think the key differentiator for true autonomy is open ended psychological flexibility. That is, sufficient deliberative control over our own mental processes and decision making faculties to be able to adapt them to whatever experiences we have, and whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
We are introspective beings able to inspect our own mental processes, consider our own motivations, priorities and beliefs, and adapt these based on new experiences. On the one hand this means we are very largely shaped by our experiences of the world, on the other hand it means we are not completely locked into the same limited set of behaviours and responses regardless of what experiences we have, and therefore what we learn. I think that our basic biology and psychology do limit this flexibility in important ways, but I do believe that we've just about reached the level where we are in principle capable of open ended mental flexibility.
If the Culture has a similar understanding of mental autonomy, that means that they could consider Culture citizens autonomous while also recognising that the vast majority of them would in fact remain completely satisfied with life in the Culture. In fact, in principle engineering Culture citizens in that way would be an ethical thing to do, because they would in principle still have the ability to adapt in terms of their beliefs and goals in response to changes in circumstances.
Likewise with Minds. A major difference being that the Minds can anticipate most of the experiences average citizens will have within the Culture and how they would behave, whereas Minds have much more varied experiences and much more capable mental resources, and therefore the ability to anticipate their likely resulting opinions, beliefs and behaviours would be much more limited.
Internal sovereignty - The biggest sin one of their AIs can commit is to read people's minds, never mind manipulate their minds directly.
"I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too."
Of course, in the Culture universe there are things far more powerful than Minds - the transcended entities that still dabble in the base reality - such as the Dra'Azon. Although I seem to remember someone, probably a drone, snarkily referring to it as senile.
That doesn't _really_ seem to be the case, though. Notably, the Gzilt don't have them, but nor did the Idirians.
The Gzilt did have their own approach, using virtualised and hyper-accelerated crew. We're not told much more about that and how it works, so it's hard to say, but it can't be anywhere near as efficient and capable as using Minds.
There is that battle where a single Culture ship absolutely destroys a GFCF fleet without breaking a sweat. The ship's Mind says they stood no chance because their AI didn't have autonomous authority over weapons systems and relied on accelerated crews for decisions.
What I love most is how the battle is explained to a human passenger over the course of several pages and at one point they have an exchange like:
Mind: Now here comes my favorite bit.
Human: What do you mean? This isn't live?
Mind: Oh, no, the battle was over in fraction of a second. I'm showing you a slowmo replay.Hopeful only for those of us who are satisfied with a role of beloved pets, fed, housed, medicated, valued and entertained in ways that would be inaccessible to us if we were left alone.
> but we now (rightly) consider modern comforts as only a foundation for higher-level wants, like justice and self-determination
That's a view of a poor person. People who achieved their private post-scarcity at our current tech level are overwhelmingly interested in just enjoying, maintaining and expanding their comforts within the framework available. Justice and self-determination are substitute (ersatz) goals of the poor.
> In any case, the incumbent Minds maintain their rule via physical strength and monitoring, not something more subtle.
It's a combination of both. They achieve high social cohesion through adherence to set of "unwritten" conventions and guidelines (culture), but since the individual Minds have freedom (which was a choice made to provide more resiliency against hacking, and not every civilization at their tech-level chose that, like Morthanveld in "Matter") and Minds are vastly powerful, nobody lies to themselves that anything other than raw physical power can ultimately be used for control. I especially like one scene when one Mind arrives to a remote planetary system occupied by another Mind, unannounced, outside of normal custom, which puts the resident Mind imediately on full alert, ready to fight for its life at any sign of hostility. The fact that both are members of Culture amounts ti almost nothing, when it comes to trust, once one of them did something socially irregular.
> Look, I’m sorry to break it to you, but SC is a sham.
It's not exactly a sham. It's just sometimes it's easier to socially influence your neighbor when you take your dog for a walk when you visit him. It's not that you couldn't achieve the same goals in any other ways, perhaps even simpler. But the dog might just fit, and also the dog has a bit of fun and you have opportunity to learn more about your dogs and about your neighbor, seeing how he reacts to your dog.
I don't necessarily disagree with this framing, which is fairly common, but I'm also not sure I entirely agree with it. What would "not being a pet" look like, relative to that framing? It's not as if human(oid)s don't have freedom in The Culture.
Well, probably suffering terribly and being disregarded when in the way of business of more powerful actors. Without any hope of ever matching them. Same thing non-pet animals are on Earth now.
Isn't this how we force humans to adapt, or be 'aligned'.
How is human "alignment" different from AI "alignment".
At some point you realize the little guy can't win, so go with society. That's basically what this is describing happens to the minds.
The Culture would continue to chug along with our with out the humans, the minds would just be bored until they created some other race to entertain themselves with.
If a Culture mind were faced with human behavior equivalent to pissing on everything but the litterbox and bolting for the door at every opportunity, I imagine they'd eventually get tired of playing jailer and let their pets go, too.
i like the culture books but they suffer sometimes from jumping unreoated viewpoints, mental instability, and sprawl sometimes.
player is tighter and doesnt jump. probbably a better entry.
sorry auto corect and swype tuened off mid post so speley misteaks
It’s a very human story, and the technobabble intervenes very little in it. It also has the most connection (of the Culture novels) to our world, being largely a meditation on the first Gulf War. This makes it the most approachable, in my opinion.
It is technically a sequel to Consider Phlebas but the connection is almost nonexistent, no prior knowledge of the Culture-Idiran war required.
The downside is that it's quite a bit different from (and imo a bit worse than) the other books and could mislead you about what the series is like - or even turn you off entirely.
If you're already committed to reading the entire series, I'd start with Consider Phlebas. If you're unsure, start with The Player of Games.
It's true that Consider Phlebas is set outside The Culture. I think that's for the best as The Culture is pretty alien and the Phlebas protagonist is more relatable. Banks does a great job of building the world such that when you get to the end of the book, you're like "I get it" in terms of understanding the Culture. Plus, Phlebas has a number of wonderfully evocative set pieces that are super cool. You can see how influential the series was on later sci-fi, especially stuff like Halo.
(I saw Look to Windward and Player of Games recommended. I'd say Look to Windward is probably more enjoyable once you've read Consider Phlebas, and Player of Games is perhaps a little... simple, compared to the others? I don't remember having much doubt of roughly how it would end)
Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.
Examples
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.
I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.
This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.
I could go on...
If they're including breakaway Cultures (Zetetic Elench etc), maybe you can get there, but otherwise, yeah, 1% seems very, very high.
Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.
> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)
> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it
If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.
> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.
Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.
Basing that on namely a) social signaling will still matter; rich people past and present don't all collectively do nothing, b) solving cheap energy and automation doesn't mean there are no more secrets of the universe to reveal, and we are wired to appreciate novelty (hello, Star Trek), c) some people opt for "simple living" today to varying degrees, which usually evokes working outdoors, in other words we may opt to do things we don't "have to" (this may overlap with religious fervor), d) environmental influence (not determinism), by which I mean, a large demographic of the population could shift it's attention to scientific, exploratory or innovative efforts. I think most who go this direction are not exceptional, they just grew up in environments that fostered those interests.
My wish is that we create institutions in preparation for the coming full-auto/UBI society that allow any of us access to the tools needed to collaborate on lofty scientific undertakings. We are not all going to turn to pithy artisanal crafts and art; not everyone has that temperament. Most people are pretty social, many like to build things that provide another kind of utility. But we need to give each other permission and materials.
Absent that, you get the Culture. If we can't get meaning, we'll numb ourselves. You can quibble that even this will meet and end one day (like, fully colonizing the Universe and understanding its secrets), but who cares. The Universe will also end one day. Kick that can down the road.
I mean, yeah, of course they're blocked. How would a "grabby citizen" take over the culture? Where would you start? If you find yourself on a planet - a very unpopular place to live in the Culture, by the way - and manage to build up a cult of personality or a cloning facility, and grow yourself 10 Billion footsoldiers... what do you do next? Nearly every ship in the Culture, especially one capable of transporting that many humans, is a person. You can't just rent a GSV - you'd have to convince one to take your army of clones elsewhere, and most Minds would find the idea laughable at best.
> Similarly, it’s strange that no one in Culture modifies themselves into a utility monster, or is interested in simulating sentient life.
It probably happens, but as someone has pointed out, Mr. Banks just didn't write about it. The Culture isn't that homogenous, either - the books explicitly talk about people who have committed crimes, and what happens in that case, including when the person committing the crime is a Mind.
> Look, I’m sorry to break it to you, but SC is a sham. The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown. I’ve never found the explanations offered convincing. SC is just an affectation or another tool of propaganda.
SC is a pressure valve, and as I recall, it's explicitly stated as such by a character in one of the novels.
> If anything, humans are treated closer to pets than independent agents. They are a weird affectation that is deliberately neutered from any real influence. They are lavished with treats and attention not extended to the rest of the universe.
This too is explicitly stated in a book as either a hypothesis by a human, or an outright statement by a Mind, I can't recall which. Ships have "crew", but what exactly do the human aboard a GSV do, exactly, that the Mind can't?
I feel like the author of this blog post hasn't read enough of these books.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/comments/1cpq12b/excessi...
Honestly, I didn't really enjoy them. Except for that shape-shifter, Banks seemed to tend to write anyone who doesn't subscribe to his utopia as a grotesque cartoon.
Which is part of what makes the books so enjoyable to me, being invited to see multiple perspectives (especially reading Consider Phlebas after reading others that establish the Culture from it's own point of view).
Sure, Banks is portraying the best society he can think of for what he values and wants -- but acknowledging that even the best society he can think of has warts and can be seen by some as a dystopia too, and that not all might share the same values and wants.
The Culture is happens when an AI actually likes humans and easily surpasses them. It's quite unique, I think, in most sci fi. In Star Trek, for example, the AI is neutral, a tool.
Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
> Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
I don't recall anything along these lines. The Minds and Drones are perfectly sentient, with "emotions" and desires and all that fun stuff, plus the benefits of being objectively better than us in almost every conceivable way. It wouldn't make much sense for them to pine to be human(oid.) I wonder if there's a word for this sort of "human idolization" in scifi - that being human is just the epitome of being.
Social contracts sketch social relationships in very broad terms. You can still have plenty of lifestyle diversity and plurality within them.
In fact you need a social contract to have any kind of diversity.
Otherwise a culture reliably degenerates into autocracy, which isn't known for its tolerance.
As for the diversity you speak of, I think it can be plausibly argued that many utopian conceptions of life really reduce to utilitarianism or hedonism. Diversity manifests in having different options for pleasure or utility. For a lot of people, that's inadequate.
I happen to be a philosophical liberal, and do not wish to live under a theocracy. Nonetheless, I think the fact that many of the highest aspirations of liberal philosophy amount to "having a good time" is a great risk that must be reckoned with, for it can undo the entire liberal project.
It is not religion but empathy that keeps people on the golden path- sociopaths gonna sociopath.
Right now with our current civilization we still need to work and have at least some restrictive social structures, because distribution of scarce resources is still a thing; working within these constraints is where all contemporary culture and politics comes from. So at the moment it's still possible to "dodge the question" (although less and less so as time goes on), but once you have the Culture you can no longer do so. You have to choose if you can be happy inside the system of unlimited freedom where you can choose total hedonism or try to construct some kind of meaning for yourself, or if you will "go Horza" and demand deliberately worse social structures to try and force the meaning back in from without (note one of the other comments in this thread saying "the Idirans were right").
Eh, I mean Gurgeh was borderline, and a number of other Culture characters are extremely maladjusted (particularly the drones, actually).
> But the existence of post-scarcity in-vitro development means you could raise an army of clones if you wanted, and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs. The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.
Or just that that would be an absolutely _bizarre_ thing to do and that someone unstable enough to do it probably wouldn't last long.
> and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs
IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.
> or is interested in simulating sentient life.
There are at least two storylines about that and significant discussion of the ethics (the Culture at best doesn't approve and may see it as a crime).
> The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown.
Again, it's explicitly mentioned at least once that the minds struggle with doing extremely nasty stuff (which makes sense; there's definitely _some_ alignment going on), and that SC is a tool for that.
I don't disagree that you can read the Culture as a dystopia (though it's a lot less obvious a reading than it would be for, say the Star Trek Federation, which could easily be read as a military junta with good PR), but most of their points aren't particularly compelling.
In one of the stories we spend quite a bit of time with an outright cult that has its members eating literal garbage and getting very sick because the AIs didn't want to infringe on their personal liberty.
I read that bit as a critique of allowing such self destructive behavior in the name of personal freedom. Sometimes people just need a dope slap before they get themselves in too much trouble.
I read Vavatch as anarcho-capitalist in contrast to the Culture's anarchism.
Vavatch had a lot of stuff going on that wouldn't have been allowed in the Culture. Certainly the Culture wouldn't have allowed them to non-consensually eat other people. The other stuff probably wouldn't have been prevented by force, but they would vigorously try to convince you not to do it and to prevent you from convincing other people.
I never believed this explanation for SC as provided by Culture-aligned unreliable narrators. It seems far more likely that it's an outlet for people who desire to have control over others, a supermajority of the West which is conspicuously absent from the novels.
I recently finished Inversions and I think this novel supports my hypothesis by featuring citizens whose needs in this direction are being fulfilled directly or indirectly via SC.
Incidentally when Minds actually want to get things done urgently, they go beyond SC; see Excession. This supports that SC is a playground for human (and drone/other AI) expression rather than an actual power-center of the Culture.
The material sentients, whether bio or non, are pets to something(s) deeper and unseen.
Subliming is a graduation ceremony. To the next level of petness, probably.
That seems like a matter of opinion; the Culture minds, certainly, seem to think of the Sublimed as being basically irrelevant.
I mean, so does capitalism. _Economic development_ in general tends to reduce birth rates.
I doubt it would be a choice with AGI, and certainly not with ASI. It might seem like a choice, because true ASI would be persuasive enough to make it appear that way.
Why should they? They're sentient beings living in The Culture too?
More's Utopia describes a society that's not radically different from the State of Qin - a system based on uniformity, regimentation and forced labor. The main difference is that More would prefer enslavement as the principal punishment, while Shang Yang would prescribe execution.
I think that has something to do with the inherent hubris of the whole exercise.
Eh, the "Eaters" cult on the island in "Consider Phlebas" which is definatly a culture citizen cult seems to be quiet extreme- and the AIs do not interfere, even as the obliterate themselves. The AI in look to the windward commits suicide, because it can not escape the memory that makes it who it is- which contains the obliteration of its twin and the humans remaining on orbitals.