[HN Gopher] Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions...
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Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M.
Banks
Author : mitchbob
Score : 35 points
Date : 2025-04-30 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| theothertimcook wrote:
| "If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best
| described by Iain Banks,"
| aloisdg wrote:
| I guest Musk cant difference between anarchism and
| libertarianism
| krapp wrote:
| To be fair, I've always considered libertarians to be, for
| the most part, anarchists who won't commit.
| euroderf wrote:
| This seems fair+true. "Libertarian anarchists" is like
| "jumbo olives".. they want to build their castles in the
| sky in a free-floating environment that is only free in the
| particular way that they want; violators will be
| persecuted.
|
| Anarchosyndicalism or GTFO. YMMV.
| jbu wrote:
| "That's libertarians for you -- anarchists who want police
| protection from their slaves." - Kim Stanley Robinson
| 0_gravitas wrote:
| I've said before that Musk must have read Surface Detail and
| assumed Veppers was some kind of 'tragic hero'.
|
| It is remarkable because Banks, as much as I love his writing, is
| __rarely subtle__ about his beliefs and who the "good guys" are.
|
| (Yes there is a lot of exploration of the grey areas and
| inhumanities, and thereby legitimately critical questions of the
| titular society- but Bank's himself has said that he would very
| much like to live in the Culture, even considering all the uglier
| parts.)
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > It is remarkable because Banks, as much as I love his
| writing, is __rarely subtle__ about his beliefs and who the
| "good guys" are.
|
| My wife writes some fiction, and one thing I've learned from
| observing her interaction with test readers is that no matter
| how heavy-handed the writing, a fair proportion of readers will
| still misunderstand it. It's practically impossible to make
| anything so explicit that nobody will get it wrong, even with a
| bunch of repetition.
|
| Though, most egregious misreading activity does seem to be
| confined to the same set of readers, across discussion of her
| test-reads, other writers she knows' test reads by the same
| readers, and just general conversation about other published
| fiction--that is, certain readers struggle to follow seemingly
| _every_ damn thing they read, while others almost never make
| these kinds of errors. I find it hard to relate to wanting to
| continue reading books while being so constantly confused by
| their content, but they do it anyway. Completely alien to me,
| their experience of reading must be rather _impressionistic_
| and seems unpleasant, but to each their own.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| There was a large section of The Boys viewership that didn't
| understand that Homelander was a bad guy until season four, or
| that Walter White was Breaking Bad's biggest villain.
|
| Time after time, an astonishingly large number of readers and
| watchers assume that main characters are good and are unable to
| fathom that a main character can be bad. Luckily for the rest
| of us, this is emotional shibboleth that once identified serves
| as a high-accuracy litmus test for personal engagement.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Ironically the author of this article missed the _key theme_ that
| runs throughout the Culture novels: Humans are mere pets in a
| world where superhuman artificial intelligence exists.
|
| Anyone that wants _this_ future for humanity, wants to be a pet,
| simple as that.
| 0_gravitas wrote:
| Calling it _the_ key theme is stretching it quite a bit imo
| euroderf wrote:
| Agreed. The Minds keep us as pets if you want to view it that
| way, but they have their own "Society of Minds" to keep each
| other amused and engaged, and it takes very little of their
| bandwidth to maintain human concentrations and the general
| regional-galactical operating environment.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Unlike everything else like the sex changing, it's in every
| book and is a plot element instead of mere "background
| colour".
|
| All of the big decisions are made by the Minds, and every
| time a human thinks they're doing something of their own
| accord, it is implied (or explicitly stated) that they're
| being manipulated by a Mind.
|
| Several of the novels state this outright, including
| mentioning that Marain, the language of the culture, was
| explicitly designed to "guide" the thoughts of its human
| speakers in the "right way" as decided by the Minds that
| worked on its design. Handcuffs for the human mind so
| integrated that nobody even realises they're shackled.
|
| The humans aren't prisoners, they're pets allowed to roam
| "outside", but they're not the agents of their future in any
| real sense.
|
| PS: Horrific betrayal by a highly trusted character in a
| position of father-like authority is a running theme in
| Banks' works. The more utopian and idealistic the scenario,
| the greater the horror the reader can experience when that is
| shattered by the realisation that it was all a manipulation.
| The Wasp Factory, one of his earlier works, makes this the
| most explicit with the betrayal of the protagonist's sexual
| identity by their own father, but since that book Banks has
| learned to make this theme less explicit and more implicit,
| waiting for the reader to discover it on their own and have
| the "Oh. _Ohhhh!_ Oh God." moment. Clearly many people missed
| it in the later Culture books...
| simpaticoder wrote:
| I'm not so sure about the author's thesis. One quote alone
| explains it, "it increasingly appears that humanity is a
| biological bootloader for digital superintelligence." If indeed
| Musk believes this, then his actions now matter not at all,
| except insofar as it either helps or harms the birth of "digital
| superintelligence". This is a similar "ends justify the means"
| argument to the "effective altruists" and the general idea to
| "not miss the forest for the trees", the forest being long-term
| viability of humanity, the trees being individual well-being.
|
| During peacetime, making such an argument justifies the selfish
| and destructive action they wanted to take anyway. The framing of
| the assertion is impossible to make an objective assessment of
| the success of an action, since such an assessment may take a
| hundred, or a thousand, years. So really there is no way for
| anyone to judge whether an act is good or bad in this framework,
| leaving it only as a matter of judgement of the actor. In this
| sense, Musk's invocation of Banks is simple megalomania with more
| steps.
| hsshhshshjk wrote:
| > it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological
| bootloader for digital superintelligence.
|
| Isn't this just a restatement of Christianity? Created by an
| unknowable, all powerful deity with the goal of becoming one
| with that deity during the rapture?
|
| Ironically, many of the alien species in Banks's novels have
| "sublimation" as their goal. Their idea is to transcend space
| and time. https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sublimed
|
| So I guess it's just super intelligent turtles all the way
| down?
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