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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

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 2y ago
Calling it _the_ key theme is stretching it quite a bit imo
- euroderf 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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…
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    There's actually a scene in one of the books (Consider Phlebas I think?) where the SC character explicitly has a hobby of mountain climbing without all the safety devices the culture has to take away fatal consequences, against the advice and wishes of the minds. There are other books too where people leave the culture (including entire worlds) and do whatever. Banks is careful to write very meaningful agency into the culture to make it a utopia rather than some paternalistic pet thing. The only case where that kind of doesn't apply is special circumstances and the interesting times gang, which are heavily controversial within the culture and are explicitly pointed out as solutions that exist outside the normal moral fabric of society.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      > There are other books too where people leave the culture (including entire worlds) and do whatever. The direct analogy is a pet that ran away into the forest. This is the “exception that proves the rule”.
      - TheCoelacanth 2y ago
        Except that unlike a pet, Minds will do nothing to prevent you from leaving except for making staying as appealing as possible and in fact will actively facilitate you leaving if you choose to do so.
  - munksbeer 2y ago
    I think you're entirely wrong. I didn't read it that way at all. In fact there are humans in the culture novels who choose not to live in the typical way (eg. Genar-Hofoen one who goes to live amongst the Affront). I think they have no less agency than we do today, rather more.
  - n4r9 1y ago
    > Marain, the language of the culture, was explicitly designed to “guide” the thoughts of its human speakers I think you're overstating this. Especially considering that Marain is spoken both by humans and minds. In Banks' own words: > Marain is a synthetic language created towards the very beginning of the Culture with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable - a language, in short, that would appeal to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers alike. https://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html https://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html
sidibe 2y ago
A pet who gets whatever they want and is encouraged to find and do what makes them happy. Feeling important and actually doing things that feel important is nice but if AI is better than you at everything its the best we can expect we can expect with AI. I get how it can be dystopian to people who live for competition or just need to feel useful but we need to adapt if AI is going to be better than us at any jobs to feel fulfilled with recreation and hobbies. It's doable, retirees have to face this situation with a bunch of additional stress they don't have in the Culture
- n4r9 2y ago
  I'm with you. I don't think Banks is saying "this is the best way for things to be". I think he's saying "this is the best way things can realistically be once true AI is developed and given appropriate rights".
giraffe_lady 2y ago
I think you missed the key theme that human lives still have meaning on their own terms even in a world where personal achievement & competitive excellence do not. The stories are about the struggles of individual humans to discover those terms for themselves, but the work doesn't attempt to show that this quest is impossible or futile.
mpalmer 2y ago
I think you're going to want some super intelligence on your side eventually
joshjob42 2y ago
What is a pet in the relevant sense here? Let's assume you have everything in the Culture except the ASIs. So you have full blown Drexlerian nanotechnology, access to all the technology more or less possible out to the limits of physical law. Energy is functionally infinite, and if you want basically anything to be produced you simply order it from the AI equivalent of ChatGPT today and it is directly manufactured from base chemical feedstocks and delivered to you by a simple automaton. Food, clothes, furniture, any sort of electronics. Homes are extremely plentiful and similarly require ~ no effort to obtain, since they are just snapped together from atomically perfect panels. When you're done with something, it gets recycled back to feedstocks to be made into something else. Okay. Now what? You're free to love who you like, befriend who you like. But nothing you do matters really for anyone else beyond sentimental value, since nothing you do effects whether they live or die (you're all functionally immortal after all, plausibly you can backup your consciousness and get resleeved if something truly catastrophic was to happen to you). There's no scarcity, no need to horde things, you play games and amuse yourself in whatever little hobbies delight you, and you socialize with those who you care to. What exactly is the grand thing that you think people are going to be doing in that scenario that they can't do in the Culture? It seems apparent that for the overwhelmingly enormous majority of people the Culture is identical to the case where there are no Minds, because to whatever extent some tiny portion of humans needs to make some sort of major decisions in a post-scarcity world with no Minds, 99.9999+% of people will not be among them. We see mostly people interacting with Special Circumstances (a tiny fraction of the overall population) and most of those who live on GSVs etc managed by Minds in SC themselves are also just going about their days and not involved with whatever machinations the Minds have going on. Like, what is the problem that ASI really introduces here for regular people? And in a world where you are indeed free to leave the Culture (as we've seen) if you really want to, and there's plenty of variety in how smaller groups in the Culture live their lives, what exactly is missing? There is no oppression, no brutality, no war, disease, famine, poverty, or want and you're free to do as you like except kill people without their consent and/or otherwise hurt others. What more freedom do you really want?
- sidibe 2y ago
  The people who view culture as a dystopia either feel like they must be working and useful and don't see a way to do that when everything is provided if they choose not to work, or (and I hope this isn't it) they want to be relatively much better off than others I understand the first one but that's something people need to get over, it's already a part of being old or having a handicap that makes you unemployable, I think future generations will grow up without equating hard work with ethics
rsynnott 2y ago
This is something which comes up _in-universe_, but the general consensus amongst the AIs seems to be that it is _not_ the case, and that they are interdependent.
TheCoelacanth 2y ago
If Culture humans are pets of AIs, then 99% of current humans are pets of governments, corporations and other human hierarchies. Culture Minds have far more respect for individual self-determination than any human power structure that has ever existed. I don't weep at all for the 1% of humans who lose the ability to dominate the lives of other humans. The other 99% of humans lose nothing and gain enormous freedom.

0_gravitas 2y ago

Calling it _the_ key theme is stretching it quite a bit imo

euroderf 2y ago
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 2y ago
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…
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  There's actually a scene in one of the books (Consider Phlebas I think?) where the SC character explicitly has a hobby of mountain climbing without all the safety devices the culture has to take away fatal consequences, against the advice and wishes of the minds. There are other books too where people leave the culture (including entire worlds) and do whatever. Banks is careful to write very meaningful agency into the culture to make it a utopia rather than some paternalistic pet thing. The only case where that kind of doesn't apply is special circumstances and the interesting times gang, which are heavily controversial within the culture and are explicitly pointed out as solutions that exist outside the normal moral fabric of society.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    > There are other books too where people leave the culture (including entire worlds) and do whatever. The direct analogy is a pet that ran away into the forest. This is the “exception that proves the rule”.
    - TheCoelacanth 2y ago
      Except that unlike a pet, Minds will do nothing to prevent you from leaving except for making staying as appealing as possible and in fact will actively facilitate you leaving if you choose to do so.
- munksbeer 2y ago
  I think you're entirely wrong. I didn't read it that way at all. In fact there are humans in the culture novels who choose not to live in the typical way (eg. Genar-Hofoen one who goes to live amongst the Affront). I think they have no less agency than we do today, rather more.
- n4r9 1y ago
  > Marain, the language of the culture, was explicitly designed to “guide” the thoughts of its human speakers I think you're overstating this. Especially considering that Marain is spoken both by humans and minds. In Banks' own words: > Marain is a synthetic language created towards the very beginning of the Culture with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable - a language, in short, that would appeal to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers alike. https://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html https://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html

sidibe 2y ago

A pet who gets whatever they want and is encouraged to find and do what makes them happy. Feeling important and actually doing things that feel important is nice but if AI is better than you at everything its the best we can expect we can expect with AI. I get how it can be dystopian to people who live for competition or just need to feel useful but we need to adapt if AI is going to be better than us at any jobs to feel fulfilled with recreation and hobbies. It's doable, retirees have to face this situation with a bunch of additional stress they don't have in the Culture

n4r9 2y ago
I'm with you. I don't think Banks is saying "this is the best way for things to be". I think he's saying "this is the best way things can realistically be once true AI is developed and given appropriate rights".

giraffe_lady 2y ago

I think you missed the key theme that human lives still have meaning on their own terms even in a world where personal achievement & competitive excellence do not. The stories are about the struggles of individual humans to discover those terms for themselves, but the work doesn't attempt to show that this quest is impossible or futile.

mpalmer 2y ago

I think you're going to want some super intelligence on your side eventually

joshjob42 2y ago

What is a pet in the relevant sense here? Let's assume you have everything in the Culture except the ASIs. So you have full blown Drexlerian nanotechnology, access to all the technology more or less possible out to the limits of physical law. Energy is functionally infinite, and if you want basically anything to be produced you simply order it from the AI equivalent of ChatGPT today and it is directly manufactured from base chemical feedstocks and delivered to you by a simple automaton. Food, clothes, furniture, any sort of electronics. Homes are extremely plentiful and similarly require ~ no effort to obtain, since they are just snapped together from atomically perfect panels. When you're done with something, it gets recycled back to feedstocks to be made into something else. Okay. Now what? You're free to love who you like, befriend who you like. But nothing you do matters really for anyone else beyond sentimental value, since nothing you do effects whether they live or die (you're all functionally immortal after all, plausibly you can backup your consciousness and get resleeved if something truly catastrophic was to happen to you). There's no scarcity, no need to horde things, you play games and amuse yourself in whatever little hobbies delight you, and you socialize with those who you care to. What exactly is the grand thing that you think people are going to be doing in that scenario that they can't do in the Culture? It seems apparent that for the overwhelmingly enormous majority of people the Culture is identical to the case where there are no Minds, because to whatever extent some tiny portion of humans needs to make some sort of major decisions in a post-scarcity world with no Minds, 99.9999+% of people will not be among them. We see mostly people interacting with Special Circumstances (a tiny fraction of the overall population) and most of those who live on GSVs etc managed by Minds in SC themselves are also just going about their days and not involved with whatever machinations the Minds have going on. Like, what is the problem that ASI really introduces here for regular people? And in a world where you are indeed free to leave the Culture (as we've seen) if you really want to, and there's plenty of variety in how smaller groups in the Culture live their lives, what exactly is missing? There is no oppression, no brutality, no war, disease, famine, poverty, or want and you're free to do as you like except kill people without their consent and/or otherwise hurt others. What more freedom do you really want?

sidibe 2y ago
The people who view culture as a dystopia either feel like they must be working and useful and don't see a way to do that when everything is provided if they choose not to work, or (and I hope this isn't it) they want to be relatively much better off than others I understand the first one but that's something people need to get over, it's already a part of being old or having a handicap that makes you unemployable, I think future generations will grow up without equating hard work with ethics

rsynnott 2y ago

This is something which comes up _in-universe_, but the general consensus amongst the AIs seems to be that it is _not_ the case, and that they are interdependent.

TheCoelacanth 2y ago

If Culture humans are pets of AIs, then 99% of current humans are pets of governments, corporations and other human hierarchies. Culture Minds have far more respect for individual self-determination than any human power structure that has ever existed. I don't weep at all for the 1% of humans who lose the ability to dominate the lives of other humans. The other 99% of humans lose nothing and gain enormous freedom.