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This is a really interesting article with a lot of insight into the way that human societies function and spread, and how the Culture works with those ideas. T

by ufmace 9y ago

This is a really interesting article with a lot of insight into the way that human societies function and spread, and how the Culture works with those ideas. The thing I find doubtful though - the novels are essentially an exploration of a type of society that may happen if technology progresses in a certain way. It's interesting and fun to read about, but we don't have any particular reason to believe that technology will work in such a way to make such a society possible, or whether it's actually practical if it is. The nature of technology tends to direct a lot of the ways that societies work. The Culture essentially depends on the development of "perfect" AI. That we eventually figure out how to build General AIs that are smart and effective enough to accomplish useful things, yet never develop a desire to do things other than what their proscribed role is. Why do slap-drones become slap-drones? Do they have to volunteer for the duty, or do they just get manufactured with a desire to be a slap-drone that never changes? Can they actually be effective if they aren't capable of thinking about what they're doing and why? If they do change their minds, can they retire or switch to another job and be replaced? Who gives them their assignments and operating parameters? And the same question applies to all of the other drones and Minds and other machine intelligences that operate all of their factories and orbitals and GVSs and such. The Culture also seems to be built around everybody in it cooperating with the general goals. In our actual society, there are lots and lots of people who disagree with the general goals, or work towards pursuing different goals that not everyone agrees with. We try to form parameters for how far you can go in various directions and how to deal with people who go past the bounds. We're also generally open to the idea of that - some of those ideas and goals might be better than what we have, so it's good to let them be tried at a small scale so they can be observed and adopted more widely if they work well. We don't see much about how the Culture would deal with such things, mostly just some people and sub-societies that leave or declare themselves separate for various reasons.

petemc_ 9y ago
Banks does explore these areas. Excession contains traitorous minds, minds created for single purposes (war) and humans who don't fit in the Culture ideal. I'm sure other culture books do too but Excession is the one I've reread most.
chiph 9y ago
The "Perfect AI" was brought up in Look to Windward - the side-discussion in the novel was that cultures typically develop AI that reflect their norms. And the AI then interact with the culture over the millennia until they Sublime together. But build an AI without any of those norms, and they Sublime pretty quickly.
kjs3 9y ago
That we eventually figure out how to build General AIs that are smart and effective enough to accomplish useful things, yet never develop a desire to do things other than what their proscribed role is. There are numerous examples of AIs doing their own thing in the Culture stories. - AIs originally designed to run ships sometimes decide to do other jobs, like run a station (the AI formally in charge of the 'Lasting Damage'). - The 'Gray Area' AI violates laws around mind reading humans, among other things, in 'Excession'. - One of the AIs of 'Sleeper Service' goes kind of nuts.
aalleavitch 9y ago
I think you’re misrepresenting the way AI acts in the Culture. They’re really just depicted as hyper-competent humans, essentially, with their own goals, quirks, and personalities. The reason The Culture works is because they’re self-policing: Banks depicts the AIs as having their own moral compasses, which do occasionally come into conflict, and in stories like Excession you see how the AIs form coalitions and deal with these conflicts. You also see AIs who don’t conform to their roles and are refitted, etc. Banks seems to believe in essentially universal moral principles that any sufficiently intelligent entity will have the capacity to reason out, and that there is a semi-inevitable progression towards a better understanding of and adherence to these principles as cultures develop (because cultures that don’t will destroy themselves). Or, at least, he believes that humans will successfully pass their own arbitrary moral principles on to AI; they are raised in our culture with our values, after all. The one thing that Banks does that I really like is that he highlights the fact that sufficiently advanced AI is not just a tool or machine the way we traditionally think of them in relation to ourselves; as thinking beings they are every bit as deserving of dignity as ourselves. Actually, the truth regarding the Culture is that the humans are more or less pets, in the sense that it’s the AI’s benevolence that allows the Culture to function at all. What makes this notion uplifting rather than depressing is that Banks sees a society of super-intelligences as inevitably benevolent, but not trivially so.

by ufmace 9y ago

petemc_ 9y ago

Banks does explore these areas. Excession contains traitorous minds, minds created for single purposes (war) and humans who don't fit in the Culture ideal. I'm sure other culture books do too but Excession is the one I've reread most.

chiph 9y ago

The "Perfect AI" was brought up in Look to Windward - the side-discussion in the novel was that cultures typically develop AI that reflect their norms. And the AI then interact with the culture over the millennia until they Sublime together. But build an AI without any of those norms, and they Sublime pretty quickly.

kjs3 9y ago

That we eventually figure out how to build General AIs that are smart and effective enough to accomplish useful things, yet never develop a desire to do things other than what their proscribed role is. There are numerous examples of AIs doing their own thing in the Culture stories. - AIs originally designed to run ships sometimes decide to do other jobs, like run a station (the AI formally in charge of the 'Lasting Damage'). - The 'Gray Area' AI violates laws around mind reading humans, among other things, in 'Excession'. - One of the AIs of 'Sleeper Service' goes kind of nuts.

aalleavitch 9y ago

I think you’re misrepresenting the way AI acts in the Culture. They’re really just depicted as hyper-competent humans, essentially, with their own goals, quirks, and personalities. The reason The Culture works is because they’re self-policing: Banks depicts the AIs as having their own moral compasses, which do occasionally come into conflict, and in stories like Excession you see how the AIs form coalitions and deal with these conflicts. You also see AIs who don’t conform to their roles and are refitted, etc. Banks seems to believe in essentially universal moral principles that any sufficiently intelligent entity will have the capacity to reason out, and that there is a semi-inevitable progression towards a better understanding of and adherence to these principles as cultures develop (because cultures that don’t will destroy themselves). Or, at least, he believes that humans will successfully pass their own arbitrary moral principles on to AI; they are raised in our culture with our values, after all. The one thing that Banks does that I really like is that he highlights the fact that sufficiently advanced AI is not just a tool or machine the way we traditionally think of them in relation to ourselves; as thinking beings they are every bit as deserving of dignity as ourselves. Actually, the truth regarding the Culture is that the humans are more or less pets, in the sense that it’s the AI’s benevolence that allows the Culture to function at all. What makes this notion uplifting rather than depressing is that Banks sees a society of super-intelligences as inevitably benevolent, but not trivially so.