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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 hum

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 2y ago
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.
tivert 2y ago
> 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 I think "pets" does describe the relationship pretty well, and your attempt to refute it just confirms it: pets are "fascinating, amusing and exasperating" and cared for by humans in a kind of pseudo-"parental" relationship. It's not a true parental relationship, because pets will always and forever be inferior. That inferiority means their direct influence on the "society" they live in is pretty much nil, and they have no agency and are reduced to being basically an object kept for the owners own reasons. That's exactly what's going on in culture universe: the minds keep the humans for their own reasons. The culture (as depicted) is no longer the story of the humans in it, it's the story of the minds.

wpietri 2y ago

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.

tivert 2y ago

> 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 I think "pets" does describe the relationship pretty well, and your attempt to refute it just confirms it: pets are "fascinating, amusing and exasperating" and cared for by humans in a kind of pseudo-"parental" relationship. It's not a true parental relationship, because pets will always and forever be inferior. That inferiority means their direct influence on the "society" they live in is pretty much nil, and they have no agency and are reduced to being basically an object kept for the owners own reasons. That's exactly what's going on in culture universe: the minds keep the humans for their own reasons. The culture (as depicted) is no longer the story of the humans in it, it's the story of the minds.