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Misses the mark that "The Culture" is really a benevolent (well, to some it encounters) dictatorship of AIs... which tolerates humans because they like humans,

Misses the mark that "The Culture" is really a benevolent (well, to some it encounters) dictatorship of AIs... which tolerates humans because they like humans, kind of like how humans like their dogs and cats, indulge them, and bond with them.

scotty79 6y ago
I wouldn't call it a dictatorship. The world of AIs went so far ahead that they don't really 'rule' humans in any sense. They just make up their environment. Same way we make up the environment of lives of our pets. AIs help humans with their spare capacity out of curiosity and benevolence but they don't really hesitate about inconveniencing them when there are greater things at play. As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette. There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.
ben_w 6y ago
The Minds written about mostly seem to be the worst of them; but the exposition about the wider Culture showed they’re about as far as it’s possible to be from a dictatorship. As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  We see some pretty nasty ship Minds, e.g. one of the protagonists of Surface Detail, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is by its own admission psychotic. But it is a warship, and Veppers is, in fact, making war albeit one he can't hope to win. But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death. Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses. I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read. Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.
henrikschroder 6y ago
No, the Culture is a symbiotic civilization, the humans need the Minds, and the Minds need the humans. Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects. The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.
- Joeri 6y ago
  But the minds clearly direct the people, messing with their psychology and constructing scenarios where the people see no other option than doing what the minds want. Given that the minds are so much more intelligent, that they fully control the means of production, that they guide the development of people from birth, and that any deviancy in thinking of both people and minds is corrected, isolated or excised by the more powerful minds you have to wonder whether the culture is just one big mind trap. And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.
  - cygx 6y ago
    If we consider it benign, we call it education, if not, indoctrination. A culture that doesn't do it will cease to exist.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    Except the Culture has a very strong taboo against reading someone's mind, and they also have a strong taboo against bumping into the simulation problem, which means that the Minds won't 100% know what the humans will do, and this is the preferred state of society. The ship/mind Grey Area is explicitly condemend and ostracised from polite society because of it, for example. (The simulation problem: If you want to simulate a society of sentient beings to figure out what they would do, then your simulated entities also have to be sentient for your simulation to be 100% accurate, but then you've accidentally created sentient life, which has rights, so shutting down your simulation is genocide, which means you now have to commit to keeping that simulation running for eternity, which is too much of a bother so you shouldn't do it in the first place.)
gadders 6y ago
I think if the dictator's brain power is many magnitudes that of a human and playing 10 dimensional chess whilst humans play drafts, it can be a dictatorship without anyone even noticing.
- n4r9 6y ago
  Yes, this is the dark edge to the utopia which Banks occasionally alludes to.

scotty79 6y ago

I wouldn't call it a dictatorship. The world of AIs went so far ahead that they don't really 'rule' humans in any sense. They just make up their environment. Same way we make up the environment of lives of our pets. AIs help humans with their spare capacity out of curiosity and benevolence but they don't really hesitate about inconveniencing them when there are greater things at play. As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette. There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.

ben_w 6y ago

The Minds written about mostly seem to be the worst of them; but the exposition about the wider Culture showed they’re about as far as it’s possible to be from a dictatorship. As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.

tialaramex 6y ago
We see some pretty nasty ship Minds, e.g. one of the protagonists of Surface Detail, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is by its own admission psychotic. But it is a warship, and Veppers is, in fact, making war albeit one he can't hope to win. But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death. Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses. I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read. Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.

henrikschroder 6y ago

No, the Culture is a symbiotic civilization, the humans need the Minds, and the Minds need the humans. Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects. The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.

Joeri 6y ago
But the minds clearly direct the people, messing with their psychology and constructing scenarios where the people see no other option than doing what the minds want. Given that the minds are so much more intelligent, that they fully control the means of production, that they guide the development of people from birth, and that any deviancy in thinking of both people and minds is corrected, isolated or excised by the more powerful minds you have to wonder whether the culture is just one big mind trap. And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.
- cygx 6y ago
  If we consider it benign, we call it education, if not, indoctrination. A culture that doesn't do it will cease to exist.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  Except the Culture has a very strong taboo against reading someone's mind, and they also have a strong taboo against bumping into the simulation problem, which means that the Minds won't 100% know what the humans will do, and this is the preferred state of society. The ship/mind Grey Area is explicitly condemend and ostracised from polite society because of it, for example. (The simulation problem: If you want to simulate a society of sentient beings to figure out what they would do, then your simulated entities also have to be sentient for your simulation to be 100% accurate, but then you've accidentally created sentient life, which has rights, so shutting down your simulation is genocide, which means you now have to commit to keeping that simulation running for eternity, which is too much of a bother so you shouldn't do it in the first place.)

gadders 6y ago

I think if the dictator's brain power is many magnitudes that of a human and playing 10 dimensional chess whilst humans play drafts, it can be a dictatorship without anyone even noticing.

n4r9 6y ago
Yes, this is the dark edge to the utopia which Banks occasionally alludes to.