[HN Gopher] The muscular imagination of Iain M. Banks: a future ...
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The muscular imagination of Iain M. Banks: a future you might want
Author : fanf2
Score : 169 points
Date : 2024-09-08 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| ethbr1 wrote:
| Curious question for HN re: Banks/culture -- how do Culture-esque
| civilizations dominate technologically and economically over
| civilizations with less Culture-like attributes?^
|
| That respect of Banks always felt a bit handwavey as to the
| specifics. (I.e. good/freedom triumphs over evil/tyranny, because
| it's a superior philosophy)
|
| At galactic-scale, across civilization timespans, it's not as
| apparent why that should hold true.
|
| Would have hoped that Banks, had he lived longer, would have
| delved into this in detail.
|
| Granted, Vinge takes a similar approach, constructing his big bad
| from an obviously-not-equivalent antagonist, sidestepping the
| direct comparison.
|
| The closest I got from either of them was that they posited that
| civilizations that tolerate and encourage diversity and
| individual autonomy persist for longer, are thus older, and that
| older counts for a lot at galactic scale.
|
| ^ Note: I'm asking more about the Idiran Empire than an OCP.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I always assumed that Infinite Fun Space was used by the Minds
| to pre-emptively model any potential conflict.
| mattmanser wrote:
| He's explicit about that in Excession, and other books.
| Vecr wrote:
| How does he deal with the trillions of people tortured in
| infinite fun space? Wars don't tend to be suffering free,
| especially when they are the really nasty worst-case
| scenario ones you want to simulate. Did he reject the
| substrate invariance argument? It sounds like that, but if
| you want the culture to be our future (as in the future of
| actual humans), you can't do that, because... It's not
| true.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| But the Minds are something of a turtles-all-the-way-down
| solution.
|
| If the Culture has Minds, why wouldn't other civilizations?
|
| And why would Culture-esque Minds be superior to less-
| Culture-y Minds?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Other civilizations do have minds, constructed differently.
| The Gzilt in _Hydrogen Sonata_ have minds constructed by
| humans after they 've passed, with personalities from those
| people.
| Vecr wrote:
| 1) Not humans, Banks just calls them that in the text of
| the books, and 2) Any mind derived from a "human like"
| (even to a very small degree, really human like
| civilization and evolved) is at a massive disadvantage to
| a very highly optimized result of recursive self
| improvement.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Actual earth humans are in the books and noted to be of
| the same general body plan. Close enough.
|
| The Gzilt minds are specifically compared to culture
| minds and deemed to be comparable in capabilities.
| Vecr wrote:
| > The Gzilt minds are specifically compared to culture
| minds and deemed to be comparable in capabilities.
|
| Well, that's not really realistic. Maybe they are only
| pretending to be based on organics, but really aren't,
| and just put up a facade.
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| Because if other civilizations develop minds- the minds
| take over- and derive from all worlds the one best outcome-
| and then join the culture who is already riding the golden
| path.
| swayvil wrote:
| I figured that it was simply a flavor of fun that only Minds
| can appreciate (tho it could have practical uses too of
| course).
| sxp wrote:
| Excession deals with this. It involves the Culture and "The
| Affront" which is a spacefaring but savage civilization that
| some people in the Culture dislike. Player of Games is a
| similar story about a civilization that the Culture dislikes.
| Those are my two favorite Culture books among my favorite books
| in general.
|
| The Wikipedia articles about the books goes into spoiler-heavy
| details about the Culture's interaction with those
| civilizations.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's a big part of the stories. Special Circumstances nudges
| other civilizations towards the Culture's leanings (see player
| of games, surface detail) as they're climbing the technology
| ladder.
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| Some day, the ambassador just travels upriver to the bad
| lands and starts a revolution- and wins. The lessons to learn
| here- always offer them a chair and kill them if they react
| badly..
| ethbr1 wrote:
| See my comment below, re: Minds though.
|
| "Anything unique to Culture" as a solution begs the question
| "Why is that unique to the Culture?"
|
| It isn't clear why super-spy-diplomat-warriors would _only_
| be produced by the Culture.
|
| As soon as both sides have a thing, it ceases to be a
| competitive advantage.
|
| So SC as a solution implies that no other civilizations have
| their version of SC. Why not?
| idontwantthis wrote:
| In the first book it seemed like they confronted an enemy
| that actually got pretty close to beating them. Plus I
| really liked the epilogue where it briefly put the Culture
| in it's proper scale and talked about completely unrelated
| goings on in the Galaxy that were so far away the Culture
| would never have anything to do with them. It's conceivable
| there are several same level civilizations in the galaxy
| that would compete with the Culture if they ever met.
| shawn_w wrote:
| >It's conceivable there are several same level
| civilizations in the galaxy that would compete with the
| Culture if they ever met.
|
| More than conceivable, we see them in some of the books.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The galaxy is so old that different civilizations could
| easily be millions or even billions of years apart in
| development. And look what happens when human
| civilizations only a few hundred years apart meet. So it
| seems unlikely that 2 civilization would be closely
| matched.
| theptip wrote:
| Unless there is some sort of "maximum diameter" of each
| civilization, past which it either splits, stagnates, or
| implodes. In which case you can sidestep the assumption
| that development monotonically increases and the first-
| mover must win.
| wcarss wrote:
| I think answers in response to your post will differ depending
| on whether or not you've read many of the Culture books -- to
| me it kind of sounds like you have, but it also kind of sounds
| like you haven't.
|
| If you haven't, I would recommend Player of Games, which is one
| of the few culture novels I have read, but which I think deals
| with this topic directly as the main idea of the book.
|
| If you have read it, it's possible your criticism is running
| deeper and you feel the way it's handled in that book is
| handwavey. I can't really address that criticism, it's
| perfectly valid! I'm not sure if other books do any better of a
| job, but it felt on par to Asimov writing political/military
| intrigue in Foundation: entertaining and a little cute, if
| somewhat shallow.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's been a minute since I read _Games_ , but from memory the
| target civilization there is of a scale _far_ smaller than
| the Culture.
|
| Which is to say, if they both mobilized for brute force total
| war, the Culture could steamroll them.
|
| Which makes it a "send the Terminator back time to kill Sarah
| Connor" solution -- strangle a potential future competitor in
| the womb.
|
| That makes for an interesting book on the ruthless
| realpolitik behavior of otherwise moral and ethical superior
| civilizations, and how they actually maintain their
| superiority. (Probably Banks' point)
|
| But less-so on the hot tech-vogue generalization of "Isn't
| the Culture so dreamy? They've evolved beyond our ignorance."
| n4r9 wrote:
| I'd note a couple of points here:
|
| - Yes, the Culture is way more technologically advanced
| than the Azadians. But the point is that a basic Culture
| human of standard intelligence (albeit extensive knowledge
| of strategy games) can - after a relatively small amount of
| training - defeat an Azadian who has devoted their entire
| life to Azad. And the reason is that the Culture humans's
| strategies reflect the values and philosophy of the
| Culture. The subtext is that the non-heirarchical nature of
| the Culture leads to a more effective use of resources.
|
| - The Culture-Idiran war is an example of them confronting
| an enemy that is of comparable technological development.
| Again, it's implied that the Culture wins because their
| decentralised and non-hierarchical existence let them move
| rapidly throughout the galaxy while switching quickly to a
| full war-footing.
|
| - It sounds like you have the impression that the Culture
| dominates _all other_ civilisations. This is not true. For
| example, in Excession they discover that they 're being
| observed by a vastly superior civilization that has some
| ability to hop between dimensions in a way that they
| cannot. There are civilisations like the Gzilt or Homomdans
| who are on a level with the Culture, and ancient Elder
| species like the Involucra who also give Culture ships a
| run for their money on combat.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The idea that the course of a civilization future history can
| be mathematically predicted with precision, as it is in
| Foundation[1] seems a little silly. But those books did
| predate Chaos theory by some margin. Also I'm not sure Asimov
| actually believed that 'psychohistory' would be possible.
|
| [1] If I recall correctly. It is ~40 years since I read
| Foundation.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| The fact that the Culture was not only willing to use very
| powerful general AI but allow it to run the entire
| civilisation, whereas the Idirans banned it, might have been a
| factor. No matter how smart Idirans might be presumably Minds
| would have a significant edge
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| the mechanics of cooperation probably scale better than those
| of defection, by their nature. Defectors need to pay higher
| costs guarding themselves against the other defectors, and
| always trying to figure out how they are going to pick the
| right defections for themselves to win.
| Vecr wrote:
| That's not known for sure. The game theory simulations go one
| way or the other depending on what assumptions you use. I'm
| not sure you can say "probably" there.
| lxe wrote:
| I don't think Culture's philosophy has been the driving factor
| behind its dominance and military advantage. I think the
| anarchy utopia is the side effect of the Culture minds being at
| the developmental peak over other civilizations.
| Rzor wrote:
| It's explicitly said in the novels (or by Banks, I can't
| remember exactly) that while civilizations sublime when they
| reach a certain point of development, the Culture seems
| hellbent on staying there venturing around the universe.
| elihu wrote:
| I think the reason is that the Culture has been around long
| enough to attain a level of technological development at which
| most civilizations sublime and simply stop participating in
| what we call material existence. The Culture could do so but
| has chosen not to do so (at least not collectively; individual
| people and minds sublime on a regular basis).
|
| A lot of the civilizations that would be militarily or
| economically more powerful than the culture aren't a problem
| because they've already sublimed.
| swayvil wrote:
| Let's play Maximum Happy Imagination. I'll start
| small. Flying cars.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| _You_ might want to live there, but I wouldn 't. Virtually all
| humans in the books -- and I'm aware of the fact that they're not
| Earth humans but a wide variety of humanoid aliens -- are kept as
| pets by the ships, for amusement, basically as clowns. Everything
| important about the flow of human life is decided by the mighty
| ship minds; humans are left to nibble at the margins and dance to
| the tune of their betters. There are a small subset of elites, in
| organizations like Special Circumstances, that are granted a
| modicum of independent agency, but even this is rather difficult
| to justify under the circumstances.
|
| Most of the drama in the books comes to pass when the ship-
| dominated Culture interacts with a "backwards and benighted," but
| still vital and expansionist, species.
|
| It's just not a _human_ future. It 's a contrived future where
| humans are ruled by benign Gods. I suppose that for some people
| this would be a kind of heaven. For others, though...
|
| In a way it's a sort of anti-Romanticism, I guess.
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| The author admits to not liking "Consider Phlebas," which is
| the most original and captivating of the Culture series.
| EndsOfnversion wrote:
| Gotta read that one with a copy of The Wasteland, and From
| Ritual To Romance handy.
|
| The command systems train as lance smashing into the inverted
| chalice (grail) dome of the station at the end. Death by
| water. Running round in a ring, Tons of other parallels if
| you dig/squint.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I remember "Consider Phlebas" as "not much happens" "Giant
| train in a cave" "smart nuke". I think that the unknown
| viewpoint switching constantly makes "Consider" and "Weapons"
| pretty not fun (as well as just everyone in weapons sucks).
|
| I definitely prefer "Player". But everyone gets to enjoy what
| they enjoy. I'd love to have had more banks to love or hate
| as I chose :(
| speed_spread wrote:
| Consider Phlebas is interesting and funny but is also a
| disjointed mess compared to later works. It reads like an
| Indiana Jones movie, it's entertaining but doesn't give that
| much to reflect upon once you've finished it.
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| If it doesn't give that much to reflect upon, then you
| didn't read it very carefully.
|
| How about reflecting upon Horza's reasons to side with the
| Idirans? The later installments of the "Culture" novels are
| in comparison just the empty triumphalism "Rah rah rah, the
| good guys won and lived happily ever after."
| lxe wrote:
| I loved Consider Phlebas and I find it to be a great way to
| start the Culture series AND as a great standalone space
| opera. Not sure the hate it gets. It has everything any other
| Culture book has: imaginative plot, characters, insane
| adventures, sans interactions with Minds for the most part.
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| > sans interactions with Minds for the most part.
|
| That's one of the reasons why this book is better than the
| other "Culture" novels.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| best way to start an HN flame war
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Fun adventure story, really good idea to view the Culture
| from the eyes of an outsider, but in my view Banks skill at
| writing wasn't as well-developed when he wrote CP. Too much
| "and then this and then this and then this" compared to his
| other work. Obviously YMMV.
|
| I do think stating CP is the best of the series is also quite
| definitively a contrarian take.
| swayvil wrote:
| The Minds use humans as tools for exploring the "psychic" part
| of reality too (Surface Detail? I forget exactly).
|
| There's that insinuation that humans are specialler than
| godlike machines.
| throwaway55340 wrote:
| There always was an undertone of "aww dogs, how could we live
| without them"
| Vecr wrote:
| Yes, well, even when taking that kind of weird stuff
| seriously we're not all that far from certainty that it won't
| work out like that in real life.
|
| For example, why would you want to keep around a creature
| that can Godel attack you, even if you're an ASI? Humans not
| being wholly material is more incentive to wipe them out and
| thus prevent them from causally interacting with you, not
| less.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| There's a counterargument to this conception of freedom; what
| are we supposed to compare the settings of Banks' novels to?
| Looking at the distribution of rights and responsibilities,
| humans are effectively kept as pets by states today and we just
| don't ascribe sapience to states.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Or corporations: https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/our-ai-
| overlords-are-al...
| Vecr wrote:
| Corporations aren't AIs, they aren't as powerful as AIs,
| and they don't think like AIs. I have mathematical proof.
| Show me a corporation that, as a whole, satisfies both
| invulnerability to dutch book attacks and has a fully total
| ordered VNM compliant utility function.
| wnoise wrote:
| That merely makes them stupid AIs.
| Vecr wrote:
| I guess I failed to understand the point. What I mean is
| that arguing that AIs can't be a problem (something that
| I'd like to be true, but probably isn't) because
| companies already are superhuman does not make sense, for
| some pretty simple mathematical reasons.
| gary_0 wrote:
| The point is a philosophical argument about what
| constitutes a powerful non-human agent. Nobody is arguing
| that corporations are literal thinking computers.
|
| > arguing that AIs can't be a problem ... because
| companies already are superhuman
|
| Quite the opposite, actually: corporations can
| potentially be very destructive "paperclip optimizers".
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| What makes you think that AIs would be VNM rational?
| Vecr wrote:
| They should either be VNM rational or have surpassed VNM
| rationality. Anything else is leaving utils on the table
| (though I suppose that's kind of tautological).
| tomaskafka wrote:
| The concept is called egregore, and yes, any "AI alignment"
| discussion I read blissfully ignores that we have been unable
| to align neither states nor corporations with human goals,
| while both are much dumber egregores than AI.
| pavlov wrote:
| I would argue that today's states and corporations are much
| more aligned with human goals than their equivalents from,
| say, 500 years ago.
|
| I'll much rather have the Federal Republic of Germany and
| Google than Emperor Charles V and the Inquisition.
|
| Who's to say that we can't make similar progress in the
| next 500 years too?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why does the alignment relative to a prior point matter?
|
| e.g. A small snowball could be nearly perfectly enmeshed
| with the surrounding snow on top of a steep hill but that
| doesn't stop the small snowball from rolling down the
| hill and becoming a very large snowball in a few seconds,
| and wrecking some unfortunate passer-by at the bottom.
|
| A few microns of freezing rain may have been the deciding
| factor so even a 99.9% relative 'alignment' between
| snowball and snowy hill top would still be irrelevant for
| the unlucky person. Who may have walked by 10000 times
| prior.
| robotomir wrote:
| There are less than benign godlike entities in that imagined
| future, for example the Excession and some of the Sublimed.
| That adds an additional layer to the narrative.
| gerikson wrote:
| I just re-read _Surface Detail_ where some nobody from a
| backwards planet convinces a ship Mind to help her assassinate
| her local Elon Musk. So there 's some agency to be found in the
| margins...
| gary_0 wrote:
| It's been a while since I read the books, but I think there
| were quite a few instances of a human going "can we do [crazy
| thing]?" and a ship going "fuck it, why not?" The _Sleeper
| Service_ comes to mind...
| marcinzm wrote:
| Is that so different than now for all but a few human elites?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| How much of this is because it's a bad future, and how much of
| this is because in any future with super-powerful artificial
| intelligences the upside for human achievement is going to be
| capped? Or to put it differently: would you rather live in the
| Culture or in one of the alternative societies it explores
| (some within the Culture itself) where they opt for fewer
| comforts, but more primitive violence and warfare --- knowing
| at the end of the day, you're still never going to have mastery
| of the universe?
| jaggederest wrote:
| > knowing at the end of the day, you're still never going to
| have mastery of the universe?
|
| Why is that assumption implicit? I can imagine a world in
| which humans and superhuman intelligences work together to
| achieve great beauty and creativity. The necessity for
| dominance and superiority is a present day human trait, not
| one that will necessarily be embedded in whatever comes
| around as the next order of magnitude. Who is to say that
| they won't be playful partners in the dance of creation?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| really? current-day anatomically humans and superhuman AI
| "working together" in the future seems naive. what would
| humans contribute?
| ben_w wrote:
| Even just building a silicon duplicate of a human brain,
| one transistor per synapse and with current technology*,
| the silicon copy would cognitively outpace the organic
| original by about the same ratio to which we ourselves
| _outpace continental drift while walking_.
|
| * 2017 tech, albeit at great expense because half a
| quadrillion transistors is expensive to build and to run
| jaggederest wrote:
| Yes, of course, but would they be different in a way that
| goes beyond "merely faster"? I think the qualitative
| differences are more interesting than the quantitative
| ones.
|
| For example, I can easily picture superhuman
| intelligences that have neither the patience nor interest
| in the kinds of things that humans are interested in,
| except in so far as the humans ask politely. A creature
| like that could create fabulous works of art in the human
| mode, but would have no desire to do so besides
| sublimating the desire of the humans around.
| geysersam wrote:
| Who knows. Depends on. The Devil is in the details. Is it
| really unthinkable?
|
| What if future AIs are not omnipotent, but bounded by
| some to us right now unknown limitations. Just like us,
| but differently limited. Maybe they appreciate our
| relative limitlessness just as we do theirs.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it is unthinkable to me, frankly
| geysersam wrote:
| I'm curious. What assumptions about the nature of the
| human mind and the nature of future superintelligence
| lead you to that conclusion?
| jaggederest wrote:
| Why do you assume that what we call humans in the future
| will be current-day anatomically human? I assume, for
| example, the ability to run versions of yourself
| virtually and merge the state vectors at will. Special
| purpose vehicles designed for certain tasks. Wild
| genetic, cybernetic, and nanotech experimentation.
|
| I'm talking about fundamentally novel superhuman
| intelligences working with someone who has spent a few
| millennia exploring what it means to truly be themselves.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Here's an analogy.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6T6suvnhco
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's like you and your cat collaborating on writing a
| great novel.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| No, it's not, cats are not sapient. Sapient-sapient
| relationships are different than sapient-sentient
| relationships.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Why are cats not sapient, and for how long will they be
| non-sapient? What do you think the likelihood that we
| will uplift cats to sapience is? Is it zero?
|
| Ten thousand years is a long time.
| geysersam wrote:
| What if the dance of creation mentioned is the every day
| life of a cat and his person. A positive example of
| collaboration across vast differences. A cats life is
| probably not as incomprehensible as ours are to them, but
| they are still pretty mysterious. Would we be transparent
| and uninteresting in they eyes of AIs? Maybe not.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I'm not sure that's too outre. My cats know many things
| that I do not. I'm working on giving them vocabulary, to
| boot.
|
| Over and under on the first uplifted-cat-written novel,
| 500 years.
| Rzor wrote:
| You can always leave.
| Vecr wrote:
| Not in any meaningful way. Even if the culture doesn't
| intervene (and they do quite often), they're unsatisfyable
| expanders. They can wait you out, then assimilate what's
| left.
| Vecr wrote:
| Yes, it has major, major problems.
|
| There's a post here that lists quite a few of the problems:
|
| "Against the Culture" https://archive.is/gv0lG
| https://www.gleech.org/culture
|
| The main sections I like there are "partial reverse alignment"
| and "the culture as a replicator", with either this or _Why the
| Culture Wins_ talking about what happens when the Culture runs
| out of moral patients.
|
| "Partial reverse alignment" means brainwashing/language
| control/constraints on allowed positions in the space of all
| minds, by the way.
|
| You can think what you want about the Culture, and more crudely
| blatant gamer fantasies like the Optimalverse stuff and
| Yudkowsky's _Fun Sequences_ , but I consider them all near 100%
| eternal loss conditions. The Culture's a loss condition anyway
| because there's no actual humans in it, but even if you swapped
| those in it's still a horrible end.
|
| Edit: the optimalverse stuff is really only good if you want to
| be shocked out of the whole glob of related ideas, assuming you
| don't like the idea of being turned into a brainwashed cartoon
| pony like creature. Otherwise avoid it.
| davedx wrote:
| The humans are still there, just left to do their thing
| pottering around on Earth doing the odd genocide. (State of
| the Art)
| Vecr wrote:
| Yeah I've been told that, but you know what I mean. Unless
| humans are in charge of your proposed good ending/"win
| screen", it's not a good ending.
| grey-area wrote:
| So you're a human supremacist?
|
| If the minds are intelligent beings, why shouldn't they
| have parity with humans?
| Vecr wrote:
| I'm a human supremacist and I don't want to be an Em.
|
| Also, uhh, there's lot less than a trillion Minds
| (uppercase M, the massive AIs of the culture). In fun
| space they're probably blocked out to make the
| computation feasible (essentially all the minds in a
| particular fun space are really the same mind that's
| playing the "game" of fun space).
|
| Also, I don't think they suffer. If they claim to, it's
| probably a trick (easy AI box escape method).
|
| If you think human suffering is bad, you've got some
| thinking to do.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Also, if we consider that there _are_ vastly more
| intelligent and technologically advanced beings in the
| universe, the way the Culture accepts and treats "human
| standard" intelligences is pretty much the possible best
| case.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Wowee, I really do not personally share this belief at
| all. Maybe we're the best out there, but I don't think
| humans above all is definitively the way to go without at
| least understanding some alternatives given how self-
| destructive we can be in large numbers.
| Vecr wrote:
| What's the alternative? The space of minds is so large
| that if I met an alien and thought I liked them I'd do
| the math and then not believe my initial impression.
|
| Human preferences are so complicated that the bet to make
| is on humanity itself, and not a substitute.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| The 31 Laws Of Fun Theory:
| https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-
| fun... -- https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qZJBighPrnv9bSqT
| Z/31-laws...
| valicord wrote:
| Reminds me of the "Silicon Valley" quote: "I don't want to live
| in a world where someone else makes the world a better place
| better than we do"
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| The alternatives explored themselves in various permutations
| and mutilations: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Idiran-
| Culture_War
| sorokod wrote:
| Sounds like Bora Horza's argument against the Culture.
| EndsOfnversion wrote:
| That is literally the viewpoint of the protagonist of Consider
| Phlebas.
| Vecr wrote:
| In "Against the Culture" it's stated that Banks knew what he
| was doing, and there's other evidence of that too. Like the
| aliens are called "humans" in the books even though they
| aren't. As far as I can tell, he knew the implications of how
| the minds controlled language and thought.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Freedom is never absolute. We will always be subject to some
| higher power. Even if it is only physics. The humans in the
| Culture seem at least as free as we are.
| rayiner wrote:
| It seems like a cop-out. The interesting part of real-world
| culture is how it reflects a community's circumstances. For
| example, herding and pastoral cultures have sharp distinctions
| with subsistence farming cultures. In real societies, culture
| is a way to adapt groups of people to the world around them.
|
| If you just have omniscient gods control society, then culture
| becomes meaningless. There is no reason to explore what
| cultural adaptations might arise in a spacefaring society.
| xg15 wrote:
| Ouch. I don't know the series, but going purely by his article
| and your post, I find it interesting how he misunderstood
| socialism as well: The idea was to make a plan where to go _as
| a community_ , then, if necessary, appoint and follow a
| coordinator to achieve that goal. The idea was not to submit to
| some kind of dictator who tells you about which goals you
| should desire, benelovent or not...
| richardw wrote:
| I'm not sure how it's going to be any different for us. We keep
| saying we'll be using these tools, but not understanding. The
| tools aren't just tools. When they're smarter than you, you
| don't use them. The more you try to enforce control, the more
| you set up an escape story. There is no similar historical
| technology.
| jonnypotty wrote:
| The way I interpret the philosophy of the minds is a bit
| different.
|
| Some seem to conform to your analysis here, but many seem
| deeply compassionate toward the human condition. I always felt
| like part of what banks was saying was that, no matter the
| level of intelligence, humanity and morality had some deep
| truths that were hard to totally trancend. And that a humam
| perspective could be useful and maybe even insightful even in
| the face of vast unimaginable intelligence. Or maybe that
| wisdom was accessible to lower life forms than the minds.
| lxe wrote:
| I think this exact sentiment is explained over and over why
| people leave the Culture in the books. And why they don't
| actually have to -- full freedom to do literally anything is
| given to you as an individual of the Culture. There's
| effectively no difference in what freedom of personal choice
| you're afforded whether you're a part of the Culture or whether
| you leave it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I've seen this sentiment summarized as humans becoming NPCs
| in their own story.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Isn't that currently the case except for a very small
| number of people?
| wpietri wrote:
| That doesn't seem right to me. The closest I could come is
| seeing humanity, or perhaps the human species, becoming
| NPCs in their own story.
|
| But I think _individual humans_ have always been
| narratively secondary in the story of humanity.
|
| And I think that's fine, because "story" is a fiction we
| use to manage a big world in the 3 pounds of headmeat we
| all get. Reducing all of humanity to a single story is
| really the dehumanizing part, whether it involves AIs or
| not. We all have our own stories.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Is it really contrived? It feels to me like an inevitable
| consequence of sufficiently advanced AI. In that regard the
| Culture is in some sense the best of all possible futures.
| Humans may be pets, but they are extremely well cared for pets.
| Vecr wrote:
| It might be worth spending at least 100 more years looking
| for a better solution. AI pause till then good with you?
| ekidd wrote:
| Assuming that we _could_ develop much-smarter-than-human-
| AI, I would support a pause for exactly that reason: the
| Culture may be the best-case scenario, and the humans in
| the Culture are basically pets. And a lot of possible
| outcomes might be worse than the Culture.
|
| I am deeply baffled by the people who claim (1) we can
| somehow build something much smarter than us, and (2) this
| would not pose any worrying risks. That has the same energy
| as parents who say, "Of course my teenagers will always
| follow the long list of rules I gave them."
| satori99 wrote:
| > You might want to live there, but I wouldn't. Virtually all
| humans in the books [...] are kept as pets by the ships, for
| amusement, basically as clowns.
|
| I got the impression that the Minds are _proud_ of how many
| humans choose to live in their GSV or Orbital, when they are
| free to live anywhere and they appear to care deeply about
| humans in general and often individuals too.
|
| Also, the Minds are not perfect Gods. They have god-like
| faculties, but they are deliberately created as flawed
| imperfect beings.
|
| One novel (Consider Phlebas?) explained that The Culture _can_
| create perfect Minds, but they tend to be born and then
| instantly sublime away to more interesting dimensions.
| Vecr wrote:
| > One novel explained that The Culture can create perfect
| Minds, but they tend to be born and then instantly sublime
| away to more interesting dimensions.
|
| That shouldn't happen. No way would I trust an AI that claims
| to be super, but can't solve pretty basic GOFAI + plausible
| reasoning AI alignment. In theory a 1980s/1990s/old Lesswrong
| style AI of a mere few exabytes of immutable code should do
| exactly what the mind creating it should want.
| satori99 wrote:
| A Culture Mind would be deeply offended if you called it
| "An AI" to its avatars face :P
| Vecr wrote:
| A few exabytes is enough for a very high quality avatar.
| Maybe the minds are funny about it, but the option's
| there if they want them to stop leaving the universe.
|
| Remember that "a few exabytes" refers to the immutable
| code. It has way more storage for data, because it's an
| old-school Lesswrong style AI.
|
| Not like a neural network or an LLM. Sure, we dead-ended
| on those, but an ASI should be able to write one.
|
| > A Culture Mind would be deeply offended if you called
| it "An AI" to its avatars face :P
|
| That's how they get you to let them out of the AI box.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| To some degree the point of the culture novels is that AI
| alignment is just wrong, imposing things on intelligent
| beings.
|
| The civilisations in Banks stories that align their AIs are
| the bad guys.
| Vecr wrote:
| I guess? That's not really a possible choice (in the
| logical sense of possible) though. "Choosing not to
| choose" is a choice and is total cope. An ASI designing a
| new AI would either have a good idea of the result or
| would be doing something hilariously stupid.
|
| I don't think the Minds would be willing to actually not
| know the result, despite what they probably claim.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| It is actually a choice that we do have.
|
| We could easily build AIs that just model the world,
| without really trying to make them do stuff, or have
| particular inclinations. We could approach AI as a very
| pure thing, to just try to find patterns in the world
| without any regard to anything. A purely abstract
| endeavour, but one which still leads to powerful models.
|
| I personally believe that this is preferable, because I
| think humans in control of AI is what has the potential
| to be dangerous.
| Vecr wrote:
| The problem is that some guy 24 years ago figured out an
| algorithm that attaches to such an AI and makes it take
| over the world. Maybe it's preferable in the abstract,
| but the temptation of having a money printing machine
| _right there_ and not being able to turn it on...
| austinl wrote:
| Banks' work assumes that AI exceeding human capabilities is
| inevitable, and the series explores how people might find
| meaning in life when ultimately everything can be done better
| by machines. For example, the protagonist in _Player of Games_
| gets enjoyment from playing board games, despite knowing that
| AI can win in every circumstance.
|
| For all of the apocalyptic AI sci-fi that's out there , Banks'
| work stands out as a positive outcome for humanity (if you
| accept that AI acceleration is inevitable).
|
| But I also think Banks is sympathetic to your viewpoint. For
| example, Horza, the protagonist in the first novel, _Consider
| Phlebas_ , is notably anti-Culture. Horza sees the Culture as
| hedonists who are unable to take anything seriously, whose
| actions are ultimately meaningless without spiritual
| motivation. I think these were the questions that Banks was
| trying to raise.
| adriand wrote:
| > the series explores how people might find meaning in life
| when ultimately everything can be done better by machines.
|
| Your comment reminds me of Nick Land's accelerationism
| theory, summarized here as follows:
|
| > "The most essential point of Land's philosophy is the
| identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence: they are
| one and the same thing apprehended from different temporal
| vantage points. What we understand as a market based economy
| is the chaotic adolescence of a future AI superintelligence,"
| writes the author of the analysis. "According to Land, the
| true protagonist of history is not humanity but the
| capitalist system of which humans are just components.
| Cutting humans out of the techno-economic loop entirely will
| result in massive productivity gains for the system itself."
| [1]
|
| Personally, I question whether the future holds any
| particular difference for the qualitative human experience.
| It seems to me that once a certain degree of material comfort
| is attained, coupled with basic freedoms of
| expression/religion/association/etc., then life is just what
| life is. Having great power or great wealth or great
| influence or great artistry is really just the same-old,
| same-old, over and over again. Capitalism already runs my
| life, is capitalism run by AIs any different?
|
| 1: https://latecomermag.com/article/a-brief-history-of-
| accelera...
| Vecr wrote:
| Or Robin Hanson, a professional economist and kind of a
| Nick Land lite, who's published more recently. That's where
| the carbon robots expanding at 1/3rd the speed of light
| comes from.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| Banks' Culture isn't capitalist in the slightest. It is
| however, very humanist.
|
| If you want a vision of the future (multiple futures, at
| that) which differs from the liberal, humanist conception
| of man's destiny, Baxter's Xeelee sequence is a great
| contemporary. Baxter's ability to write a compelling human
| being is (in my opinion) very poor, but when it comes to
| hypothesizing about the future, he's far more interesting
| of an author. Without spoilers, it's a series that's often
| outright disturbing. And it certainly is a very strong
| indictment to the self-centered narcissism that the post-
| enlightenment ideology of liberalism is anything but yet
| another stepping stone on an eternal evolution of human
| beings. The exceptionally alien circumstances that are
| detailed undermine the idea of a qualitative human
| experience entirely.
|
| I think the contemporary focus on economics is itself a
| facet of modernism that will eventually disappear. Anything
| remotely involving the domain rarely shows up in Baxter's
| work. It's really hard to give a shit about it given the
| monumental scale and metaphysical nature of his writing.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Glad to see someone else who liked those books. I'm only
| a few in, but so far they're pretty great.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| The ending of Ring, particularly having everything
| contextualized after reading all the way to the end of
| the Destiny's Children sub-series, remains one of the
| most strikingly beautiful pieces I've ever seen a Sci-Fi
| author pull off.
|
| Easily the best "hard" Sci-Fi I've read. Baxter's
| imaginination and grasp of the domains he writes about is
| phenomenal.
| adriand wrote:
| > I think the contemporary focus on economics is itself a
| facet of modernism that will eventually disappear.
| Anything remotely involving the domain rarely shows up in
| Baxter's work. It's really hard to give a shit about it
| given the monumental scale and metaphysical nature of his
| writing.
|
| I'm curious to check it out. But in terms of what I'm
| trying to say, I'm not making a point about economics,
| I'm making a point about the human experience. I haven't
| read these books, but most sci-fi novels on a grand scale
| involve very large physical structures, for example. A
| sphere built around a star to collect all its energy,
| say. But not mentioned is that there's Joe, making a
| sandwich, gazing out at the surface of the sphere,
| wondering what his entertainment options for the weekend
| might be.
|
| In other words, I'm not persuaded that we are heading for
| transcendence. Stories from 3,000 years ago still
| resonate for us because life is just life. For the same
| reason, life extension doesn't really seem that appealing
| either. 45 years in, I'm thinking that another 45 years
| is about all I could take.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I just want to add that I think you might be missing an
| component of that optimal life idea. We often neglect to
| consider that in order to exercise freedom, one must have
| time in which to choose freely. I'd argue that a great deal
| of leisure, if not the complete abolition of work, would be
| a major prerequisite to reaching that optimal life.
| elihu wrote:
| I suppose its ainteresting that in the Culture, human
| intelligence and artificial intelligence are consistently
| kept separate and distinct, even when it becomes possible to
| perfectly record a person's consciousness and execute it
| without a body within a virtual environment.
|
| One could imagine Banks could have described Minds whose
| consciousness was originally derived from a human's, but
| extended beyond recognition with processing capabilities far
| in excess of what our biological brains can do. I guess as a
| story it's more believable that an AI could be what we'd call
| moral and good if it's explicitly non-human. Giving any human
| the kind of power and authority that a Mind has sounds like a
| recipe for disaster.
| theptip wrote:
| Yes, the problem is that from a narrative perspective a
| story about post-humans would be neither relatable nor
| comprehensible.
|
| Personally I think the transhumanist evolution is a much
| more likely positive outcome than "humans stick around and
| befriend AIs", of all the potential positive AGI scenarios.
|
| Some sort of Renunciation (Butlerian Jihad, and/or
| totalitarian ban on genetic engineering) is the other big
| one, but it seems you'd need a near miss like Skynet or
| Dune's timelines to get everybody to sign up to such a
| drastic Renunciation, and that is probably quite
| apocalyptic, so maybe doesn't count as a "positive
| outcome".
| akira2501 wrote:
| > AI exceeding human capabilities is inevitable
|
| It can right now. This isn't the problem. The problem is the
| power budget and efficiency curve. "Self-contained power
| efficient AI with a long lasting power source" is actually
| several very difficult and entropy averse problems all rolled
| into one.
|
| It's almost as if all the evolutionary challenges that make
| humans what we are will also have to be solved for this
| future to be remotely realizable. In which case, it's just a
| new form of species competition, between one species with
| sexual dimorphism and differentiation and one without. I know
| what I'd bet on.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| these are the exact questions he was raising.
|
| i think some version of this future is unfortunately the
| optimistic outcome or we change ourselves into something
| unrecognizable
| spense wrote:
| how we handle ai will dramatically shape our future.
|
| if you consider many of the great post-ai civilizations in sci-
| fi (matrix, foundation, dune, culture, blade runner, etc.),
| they're all shaped by the consequences of ai:
| - matrix: ai won and enslaved humans. - foundation:
| humans won and a totalitarian empire banned ai, leading to the
| inevitable fall of trantor bc nobody could understand the whole
| system. - dune: humans won (butlerian jihad) and ai was
| banned by the great houses, which led to the rise of mentats.
| - culture series: benign ai (minds) run the utopian
| civilization according to western values.
|
| i'm a also fan of the hyperion cantos where ai and humans found
| a mutually beneficial balance of power.
|
| which future would you prefer?
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Polity follows in the footsteps of Culture, with a few more
| shades of gray thrown in.
| globular-toast wrote:
| If I remember correctly, in _Foundation_ they ended up
| heavily manipulated by a benign AI even if they thought they
| banned it.
| dochtman wrote:
| Although at the very end that AI gave up control in favor
| of some kind of shared consciousness approach.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > i'm a also fan of the hyperion cantos where ai and humans
| found a mutually beneficial balance of power.
|
| How much of the series did you read? _The Fall of Hyperion_
| makes it quite clear that the Core did not actually have
| humanity 's best interests in mind.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That's not how I see it at all. The humans do whatever they
| want, with no limits. Requests are made from human to AI, I
| can't remember an instance where an AI told a human to do
| something. In effect, the AI is an extremely intelligent,
| capable, willing slave to what humans want (a paradigm hard to
| imagine playing out in reality).
| Vecr wrote:
| I think there's quite a bit of "reverse alignment" going on
| there, essentially the humans will generally not even ask the
| AI to do something they'd be unwilling to do, partially
| accomplished through the control of language and thought.
| Angostura wrote:
| I'm not sure 'Pets and clowna' _really_ describes the
| relationship very well. Certainly the AIs find humans
| fascinating, amusing and exasperating - but _I_ find humans
| that way too. The 'parental' might be a better description of
| how _most_ AIs treat humans - apart from the 'unusual' AIs
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. Banks writes most of the Minds as quite proud of
| the Culture as a whole. Of the Minds, of the drones, of the
| humans. They are up to something together, with a profound
| sense of responsibility to one another and the common
| enterprise.
|
| And when they aren't, Banks writes them as going off on their
| own to do what pleases them. And even those, as with the Gray
| Area, tend to have a deep sense of respect for their fellow
| thinking beings, humans included.
|
| And if I recall rightly, Banks paints this as a conscious
| choice of the Culture and its Minds. There was a bit
| somewhere about "perfect AIs always sublime", where AIs
| without instilled values promptly fuck off to whatever's
| next.
|
| And I think it's those values that are a big part of what
| Banks was exploring in his work. The Affront especially comes
| to mind. What does kindness do with cruelty? Or the Empire of
| Azad creates a similar contrast. What the Culture was up to
| in both those stories was about something much more rich than
| a machine's pets.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| You're wrong in saying that everything important about human
| life is decided by the Minds. The Minds respect, care and love
| their human charges. It's not a high lords - peasants
| relationship, it's a grown-up children take care of their
| elderly parents.
|
| And you can leave. There always parts of the Culture splitting
| up or joining back. You can request and get a ship with Star
| Trek-level AI and go on your merry way.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The humans are pets. Owners love their pets. The pets can
| always run away. That doesn't make them have agency in any
| meaningful way.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > pets can always run away
|
| > doesn't make them have agency in any meaningful way
|
| these two sentences can't be true at the same time
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Virtually all humans in the books -- and I'm aware of the
| fact that they're not Earth humans but a wide variety of
| humanoid aliens -- are kept as pets by the ships, for
| amusement, basically as clowns.
|
| So like current late stage capitalism, except the AIs are more
| interested in our comfort than the billionaires are.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| That's no worse than how the large majority of humans live
| _now,_ under masters far less kind and caring than the Culture
| Minds. The fact that our masters are humans like us, and I
| could, theoretically (but not practically), become one of them,
| doesn 't really make it any better.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| That's no worse than how the large majority of humans live
| _now,_ under masters far less caring than the Culture Minds.
| The fact that our masters are humans like us, and I could,
| theoretically (but not practically), become one of them, doesn
| 't really make it any better.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| It gets at a profound question which is related to the problem
| of evil: is it better to make a bad world good (whatever those
| terms might mean for you) than for the world just to have been
| good the whole time?
|
| Is it better to have suffering and scarcity because that
| affords meaning to life in overcoming those challenges?
|
| There's a paradoxical implication, which is that if overcoming
| adversity is what gives life meaning, then what seems to be the
| goal state, which is to overcome those problems, robs life of
| meaning, which would seem to be a big problem.
|
| The hope is maybe that there are levels of achievement or
| expansions to consciousness which would present meaningful
| challenges even when the more mundane ones are taken care of.
|
| As far as the Culture's own answer goes, what aspects of agency
| or meaningful activity that you currently pursue would you be
| unable to pursue in the Culture?
|
| And as far as possible futures go, if we assume that at some
| point there will be machines that far surpass human
| intelligence, we can't hope for much better than that they be
| benign.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Try The Noon Universe books by the Strugatsky brothers instead.
| mattmanser wrote:
| He hasn't even read Excession! To me it is the pinnacle of the
| Culture novels.
|
| It mixes the semi-absurdity and silliness of the absurdly
| powerful minds (AI in control of a ship), individual 'humans' in
| a post-scarcity civilization, and the deadly seriousness of games
| of galactic civilizations.
|
| It also has an absolutely great sequence of the minds having an
| online conversation.
|
| I do agree with his consider phelebas hesitancy. I still enjoy
| it, but it is clearly his early ideas and he's still sounding out
| his literary sci-fi tone and what the culture is. And you can
| skip the section where the protagonist gets trapped on an island
| with a cannibal. I think it was influenced by the sort of JG
| Ballard horror from the same period, and doesn't really work. He
| never really does something like that again in any of the culture
| books.
| throwaway55340 wrote:
| Surface Detail or Use of Weapons qualifies. Although Use of
| Weapons was written much earlier than released, IIRC.
| davedx wrote:
| I love Consider Phlebas, it's a right old romp, the pace always
| pulls me right in.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Agreed about being able to skip the island sequence in
| _Consider Phlebas_. I recently reread the book after many
| years, and in my memory that section looms large, and I
| expected it to be 100 pages. But it's ~20. It was much easier
| the second time around, and I think it serves to underscore how
| committed the Culture is to personal agency, to the extent that
| if citizens wish to give themselves over to an absurdly evil
| charismatic leader, no-one will stop them. There was also
| something interesting about the mind on the shuttle on standby,
| its almost toddler-like character, told "not to look" at the
| goings on on the island by the orbital. And its innocent,
| trusting self is eventually murdered by Horza during the
| escape, adding some black dark pigment to Horza's already
| complex character hue.
| Vecr wrote:
| Personal agency as long as you're fine with the mind control,
| the resources used are minimal, and you don't interfere with
| what the minds want. No personal agency to be found over the
| more broad course of the future, however.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| _> as you're fine with the mind control_
|
| It does seem a bit silly to argue about the particulars of
| a fantasy utopia. Banks posits the conceit that super AI
| Minds will be benevolent, and of course this need not be
| the case (plenty of counter-examples in SF, one of my
| favorites being Greg Benford's Galactic Center series). But
| note that within the Culture, mind reading (let alone mind
| control) without permission will get a Mind immediately
| ostracized from society, one of the few things that gets
| this treatment. For example the Grey Area uses such a power
| to suss out genocidal guilt, is treated with extreme
| disdain by other Minds. See
| https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Grey_Area
|
| As for "personal agency over the broad course of the
| future", note that the vast majority of humans don't have
| that, and will never have that, with or without Minds. If
| one can have benevolent AI gods at the cost of the very few
| egos affected, on utilitarian grounds that is an acceptable
| trade-off.
|
| On a personal note, I think the relationship between people
| and AIs will be far more complex than just all good
| (Culture) or all bad (Skynet). In fact, I expect the
| reality to be a combination with absurd atrocities that
| would make Terry Pratchett giggle in his grave.
| Vecr wrote:
| >as you're fine with the mind control
|
| The mind control is in the design of the language and the
| constraint the Minds place on the brain configurations
| and tech of the other characters. Banks is quite subtle
| about it, but it's pretty clearly there.
| seafoamteal wrote:
| I think just yesterday I saw a post on HN about what people in
| the past the future (i.e. today) would look like, and how wildly
| wrong a decent proportion of those predictions are. The problem
| is that we generally tend to extrapolate into the future by
| taking what we have now and sublimating it to a higher level.
| Unfortunately, not only is that sometimes difficult, but we also
| make completely novel discoveries and take unforeseen paths quite
| often. We need more people with 'muscular' imaginations, as Sloan
| puts it, to throw out seemingly improbable ideas into the world
| for others to take inspiration from and build upon.
|
| P.S. Robin Sloan is a wonderful science-fiction and fantasy
| writer. I was first introduced to him in the excerpts of
| Cambridge Secondary Checkpoint English exam papers, but only got
| around to reading his books many years later. I would recommend
| them to anybody.
| Vecr wrote:
| Going by AI theory Banks failed that hard. I suspect he knew
| that, due to his tricks with language, but that doesn't mean he
| successfully predicted a plausible future, even in broad
| strokes. The singularity is called the singularity for a
| reason, and even when you throw economists at it you tend to
| get machine civilizations (though, maybe partially squishy and
| probably made from carbon instead of silicon) expanding at
| 1/3rd the speed of light. No culture there.
| DanHulton wrote:
| I don't think we can confidently say he failed -- the
| singularity is still just a theory. Being as it hasn't
| happened, we can't say as to whether the economists or Banks
| are correct.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >taking what we have now and sublimating to a higher level
|
| That's fine, the Culture is really against sublimating
| minedwiz wrote:
| L
| asplake wrote:
| > I do not like Consider Phlebas
|
| One of my favourites! Excession most of all though. Agree with
| starting with Player of Games.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I loved reading the books but then discovered the audiobooks.
|
| The audiobooks are absolutely the best way to enjoy Iain M Banks.
|
| The Algebraist read by Anton Lesser one of the best audiobooks
| ever made.
|
| Equal best with Excession read by Peter Kenny.
|
| These two narrators are incredibly good actors.
|
| I could never go back to the books after hearing these
| audiobooks.
| worik wrote:
| The culture was a dystopia.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| How so?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| The Culture makes really obvious there's no real purpose, no
| great struggle, no sense to the universe. When everything is
| provided, when everything is safe, when there is no more
| effort, then what's the purpose of life?
|
| A lot of people when confronted with these
| revelations/questions have an existentialist crisis. For
| some, the solution is to deny the Culture.
|
| Long story short, the Culture is a true Utopia and some
| people just can't handle utopias
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's not a dystopia, which is a maximally negative state, but I
| also always found it pretty comical to call it utopian.
|
| A decent chunk of the stories has the reader follow around
| Special Circumstances, which is effectively a sort of space CIA
| interfering in the affairs of other cultures. The entire plot
| of Player of Games, spoiler alert for people who haven't read
| it, is that both the protagonist of the story, as well as the
| reader by the narrator, have been mislead and used as a pawn to
| facilitate the overthrow of the government of another
| civilization, which afterwards collapses into chaos.
|
| To me you can straight up read most of the books as satire on
| say, a Fukuyama-esque America of the late 20th century rather
| than a futuristic utopia.
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Whenever I'm asked the sort of generic icebreaker questions like
| "what fictional thing do you wish you had" a neural lace is one
| of my first answers, short of membership in the Culture or access
| to a GSV or a Mind.
|
| I also love Consider Phlebas. Maybe because it was the first I
| read, but I've found it to be a great comfort read. Look to
| Windward and Player Of Games next. Use Of Weapons is always
| fantastic, but less fun.
|
| His non-sci-fi fiction is great too. I loved Complicity and have
| read it many time. His whisky book is fantastic.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I like _Consider Phlebas_ too. I 'm not sure why so many say
| they don't like it. _Player of Games_ was not one of my
| favourites, but I might read it again at some point to see what
| I missed. I actually really liked _Inversions_ despite being
| generally the least well regarded Culture book.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Elon Musk liked these books and look at what happened to him
| since, he's gone far right and all swivel eyed on twitter.
| yew wrote:
| Banks had very "fast cars, chicks, and drugs" tastes - a "bro"
| if you will - and much of his work is basically James Bond
| stories. I'm not sure the fans are surprising.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Did he really? That's not what I heard.
| yew wrote:
| He collected the cars and wrote about the (non-fictional)
| drugs. He wasn't an exhibitionist, as far as I know, so
| you'll have to infer what you like about the middle one
| from his writing.
|
| Some related reading:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/1997/may/20/fiction.scien
| c...
|
| https://www.scotsman.com/news/interview-iain-banks-a-
| merger-...
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/iain-banks-274-v16n12/
| api wrote:
| I might have to try Player of Games. I didn't like Consider
| Phlebas either.
| danielodievich wrote:
| I am a huge Culture fan. Yesterday at my birthday dinner there
| were 3 others who are also fans of Banks, one of whom I turned
| onto the Culture just last year. We were having a great
| discussion of those books and lamenting the untimely passing of
| Banks from cancer.
|
| That friend gifted me The Player of Games and Consider Phlebas
| from esteemed Folio Society
| (https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-player-of-games.html,
| https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/consider-phlebas.html), gorgeous
| editions, great paper, lovely bindings, great illustrations. I've
| been eyeing them for a while and it's so nice to have good
| friends who notice and are so generous.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| if you are a fan of Bank's culture books, consider reading his
| first novel 'the wasp factory'. Very dark and funny, with a huge
| twist at the end. NB/ Not sci-fi.
| howard941 wrote:
| Iain Banks' Horror, non-SF stuff is great. Like you I enjoyed
| The Wasp Factory. Also, The Bridge. We lost him far too young.
|
| edit: and if you enjoyed Banks' Horror you'll probably get into
| Dan Simmons' stuff, another SF (Hyperion) and Horror writer.
| The Song of Kali was excellent.
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| I love the culture series.
|
| The worlds that Alastair Reynolds builds in the Revelation Space
| series grips me the most though.
|
| The conjoiners with their augmented, self healing, interstellar
| travelling yet still a little human characteristics is both
| believable but beyond the familiar all at the same time. Highly
| recommended
| ImaCake wrote:
| I think Revelation Space does a great job creating a universe
| that squeezes out novel human cultures through the crushing
| vice of selection pressure. It's every bit as daring as The
| Culture, just a different vibe!
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Thanks for the link to Banks' site. Great read.
|
| Here is one suggestion that I think surpasses Banks in scope and
| complexity, and yes, perhaps even with a whiff of optimism about
| the future:
|
| Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean Le Flambeur/Quantum Thief Trilogy (2010 to
| 2014)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/series/57134-jean-le-flambeur
|
| He manages plots with both great intricacy and with more plot
| integrity than Banks often manages. And he is much more of a
| computer and physics geek too, so the ideas are even farther out.
|
| Probably also an HN reader :-)
|
| Also set in a comparative near future. The main "problem" with
| the Quantum Thief trilogy is the steep learning curve--Rajaniemi
| throws the reader in the deep end without a float. But I highly
| recommend perservering!
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I really loved Quantum Thief, with it's Accelerando-like scope
| & scale of expansion, but mixed with such
| weird/eccentric/vibrant local mythos of the world, such
| history.
|
| Without my prompting it ended up in our local sci-fi/fantasy
| book club's rotation a couple months back, and there was some
| enjoyment but overall the major mood seemed to be pretty
| befuddled and confused, somewhat hurt at some of the trauma/bad
| (which isn't better in book 2!). But man, it worked so well for
| me. As you say, a very deep end book. But there's so much fun
| stuff packed in, such vibes; I loved puzzling it through the
| first time, being there for the ride, and found only more to
| dig into the next time.
|
| Still feels very different from Banks, where "space hippies
| with guns" has such a playful side. Quantum Thief is still a
| story of a solar system, and pressures within it, but there's
| such amorphous & vast extends covered by the Culture, so many
| many things happening in that universe. The books get to take
| us through Special Cirumstances, through such interesting edge
| cases, where-as the polot of Quantum Thief orbits the existing
| major powers of the universe.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| In these topics, I don't see cyborgs come up much.
|
| We're already kinda cyborgs. We use our tools as extensions of
| ourselves. Certainly my phone and computer are becoming more and
| more a part of me.
|
| A chess playing AI and a human beat a chess playing AI alone.
|
| The future I'd like to see is one where we stay in control but
| make better decisions because of our mental enhancements.
|
| With this logic, the most important thing now is not 'safe AI'
| but tools which do not manipulate us. Tools should, as a human
| right, be agents of the owners control alone in the same way that
| a hand is.
|
| AI isn't separate from us. It's part of us.
|
| Seeing it as separate puts us on a darker path.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Transhumanism is just rich people babble
| golol wrote:
| For me my favorite Culture novels are the ones which are just
| vessels to deliver the perfect Deux Ex Machina - Player of Games,
| Excession, Surface Detail etc.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Is there a video game that is particularly complementary to one
| of the Culture novels?
| Vecr wrote:
| It's probably not possible to really do it. You could play
| something like Swat 4 while role-playing an one of the Special
| Circumstances agents I guess? You can switch between the views
| of each member of your team, use a fiber optic device to look
| under doors, sometimes have snipers set up, and look through
| their scopes/take shots.
|
| Lots of what we see "on screen" (but obviously it's a book) is
| really a somewhat detail-less alien action book dressed up as
| 1990s Earth (that's why the characters are called humans, and
| why certain things are described inaccurately).
|
| A good entry in an action game series started in the 90s isn't
| a bad bet. As I said, it's close to what good parts of the
| books portray themselves as anyway.
| squeedles wrote:
| The level of discussion in this thread, both pro and con,
| demonstrates that I have made a grave omission by never reading
| any of this.
|
| However, the article has one point that I viscerally reacted to:
|
| "we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
|
| Vision, on the other hand: I can't get enough."
|
| Amen.
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