This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:
CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?
Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.
"Special Contact" isn't what they're called. The name is "Special Circumstances".
And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.
So that means you're getting a glimpse of the culture only in the same sense that a James Bond movie tells you about England.
You'd like to think you're seeing Tinker Tailor but you're seeing James Bond. This is a dramatisation of an edge case.
We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.
Similarly, the fact that Banks didn't write about internal threats other than the ones he wrote about (Eccentric Minds, Absconders, conspiracies to promote specific agendas, etc etc) doesn't mean that others don't exist. An absence of evidence in the text is not evidence of absence (or presence) in the wider universe.
I think the general reading that the Culture may be an over-controlled dystopia was fully intended as visible by Banks. Often as the viewpoint of a non-Culture... culture that's interacting. It's part of what makes the books so delightful. They invite you to see things multiple ways.
I adore Banks' universe, but recall reading some notes from him years ago, as tialaramex indicated, that 'all the interesting stuff happens at the edge' given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
Even though there's a good amount of utopia-description in the novels, I'd still be wary about extrapolating too much from what are primarily stories of exceptions.
(One might suggest, in response to TFA's expectation there'd be more arseholes in the Culture, that one of the most important things a utopian Culture would ensure is a robust education for all its citizens -- but I realise some popular contemporary earth-bound cultures may take that as a subtle dig.)
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
I'd rate the Eschaton series by Charlie Stross (sadly only two books ever published in that series, and it's unlikely we'll ever see a third) - Singularity Sky & Iron Sunrise - in this category.
Most of the members of the human race present on Earth, Jupiter, Saturn etc. during the events of Accelerando are murdered by their posthuman descendants. This includes the vat-grown population of conservative humans used to sway the electoral outcomes of the gas giant societies, who were murdered after they had served their use of swaying those societies.
Pure power fantasy & gratuitous as heck, but man, loved the The Golden Oecumene series, Wright's debut novels. Had not thought to see what else Wright has done!
Side note, my homelabs Kube cluster's naming scheme is AI from fiction. Rhadamanthus is one of the computers from Golden Oecumene, a powerful manor computer. Also in the cluster: Jarvis (Iron Man), Cohen (Spin State), Epicac (eponymous Vonnegut short story).
How so? In this context, “tedious” clearly means “not very exciting for the reader.” Were you hoping for more relationship drama, or romance? I’d be down for that. Though, it doesn’t seem to be what Banks was most interested in writing about.
>> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
Neal Asher did pretty well with his Polity universe. Besides AIs with some capacity for playful violence (Agent Cormac thread, but always there), we also get crablike aliens (the Prador war) and very weird biology (in particular the Spatterjay water world).
I believe the culture does allow organic life to upgrade to a culture mind. I think I read that somewhere. Of course you wouldn't be you anymore, but you have options and that always made it a pretty malleable cage you can slip out of including just leaving.
So you still have freedom of self...just not much power to shape your civilization. Most of us don't have that anyway and at some level I think I'd be ok giving that up to a group of super intelligences so I can spend more time doing the things I enjoy.
It feels refreshing to see someone sort of agreeing with something I've been saying for years.
I do feel the writer is missing one important aspect though: self-governance and having the decisions of humans matter. Horza Gobulchul was right. By relying on machines to do our decisions for us and having them take control of society, we lose a large part of what makes us human.
Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable. Human level intelligence probably just can't operate a Culture level technology base, and certainly not competitively with civs that do use Mind level AIs. So it's not a matter of whether to have them, it's how to do that.
> Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable.
That doesn't _really_ seem to be the case, though. Notably, the Gzilt don't have them, but nor did the Idirians.
I don't think the Idiran lack of Mind level AIs and them losing are co-incidental.
The Gzilt did have their own approach, using virtualised and hyper-accelerated crew. We're not told much more about that and how it works, so it's hard to say, but it can't be anywhere near as efficient and capable as using Minds.
* some degree of legibility to other human persons (e.g. a name, capacity to enter social games, a consistent personal history)
* a tolerance for information throughput within the normal distribution of human persons
The Culture abandons 1 and maybe 2, while the VO from Accelerando abandon 4. I've never seen any proof that the universe is privileged to permit all four to coexist indefinitely under conditions of social acceleration.
The question is, what do autonomy and mental sovereignty consist of when we're talking about massively genetically engineered citizens, and outright engineered minds (designed by other minds). It's a question I've been considering for a while since I switched from considering myself a hard determinist, to being a compatibilist.
I think the key differentiator for true autonomy is open ended psychological flexibility. That is, sufficient deliberative control over our own mental processes and decision making faculties to be able to adapt them to whatever experiences we have, and whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
We are introspective beings able to inspect our own mental processes, consider our own motivations, priorities and beliefs, and adapt these based on new experiences. On the one hand this means we are very largely shaped by our experiences of the world, on the other hand it means we are not completely locked into the same limited set of behaviours and responses regardless of what experiences we have, and therefore what we learn. I think that our basic biology and psychology do limit this flexibility in important ways, but I do believe that we've just about reached the level where we are in principle capable of open ended mental flexibility.
If the Culture has a similar understanding of mental autonomy, that means that they could consider Culture citizens autonomous while also recognising that the vast majority of them would in fact remain completely satisfied with life in the Culture. In fact, in principle engineering Culture citizens in that way would be an ethical thing to do, because they would in principle still have the ability to adapt in terms of their beliefs and goals in response to changes in circumstances.
Likewise with Minds. A major difference being that the Minds can anticipate most of the experiences average citizens will have within the Culture and how they would behave, whereas Minds have much more varied experiences and much more capable mental resources, and therefore the ability to anticipate their likely resulting opinions, beliefs and behaviours would be much more limited.
I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do. As I recall, the worst punishment you can get in the culture is being "Drone Slapped," which is just to have a drone follow you around and make sure you don't do any bad stuff (like kill more people if you are a murderer who wants to kill more people). This preserves considerably more autonomy than, for instance, a life sentence in prison.
I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
Most chiefdoms, proto-monarchies and monarchies in human history have had totally inalienable rights for a select few people and it's arguable to say that some states in the world today continue that tradition.
A more grounded criticism, however, is that in the modern world the range of lifestyles and careers available to most free adults is circumscribed only by their wealth, health, the laws of nature and the ability of other humans to enforce prohibitions. Competition from existing political units already exists, but nobody has it guaranteed that if they formed a new polity it would merely be a kayfabe contained inside one or more existing states.
(I think the Culture doing this is a good thing, incidentally, but it does count as removing #1.)
> I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do.
> I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
No. I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.
So they try their best to preserve the illusion of 1 and 2, while doing away with them as much as possible.
It's kind of unavoidable, from what I remember of the Culture series the Minds are a self-improving superintelligence that was created initially by humans, so denying them full rights would be unforgivable.
> But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting
> novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me
> that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.
It's not clear to me that reading the Culture series as an "ambiguous" utopia is counter to the intended reading. There is a multitude of instances in the books that show clearly the downsides of living in a utopia where every possible want is met. The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories. In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something. In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
> In Excession, it’s explained that Minds do rarely drift far enough to go rogue
> and are destroyed by the Culture. In other words, these superhuman minds have
> not solved alignment, and they cannot/will not inspect each other to determine
> misalignment before malicious action is taken.
The Culture doesn't even seem very interested in dealing with minds that do go rogue. In the same novel - Excession -, the GSV Grey Area openly violates Culture ethics, and nobody (or noship) seems to feel compelled to do anything about it.
> The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories.
You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.
Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
> I have to admit to a soft spot for the Affront. Terrible terrible people, but they did seem to be enjoying life more than anyone else.
Honestly, I didn't really enjoy them. Except for that shape-shifter, Banks seemed to tend to write anyone who doesn't subscribe to his utopia as a grotesque cartoon.
This reminds me of the thought of Isaiah Berlin, political philosopher and historian of ideas; utopian philosophies often conclude that there if there is a "right" way to live, i.e. a maximally rational way of life, then utopia will consist of everyone converging on this lifestyle. For a certain type of person, this monistic vision of life annihilates pluralism, optionality, and genuine diversity. Berlin himself espoused value pluralism, the idea that there are an infinite number of fundamental human values and ideals for which once can be deeply committed but can also be at conflict and mutually exclusive with one another.
That itself a distinctly modern framing. For many ancients, there was no such division; the way one lived was deeply entangled with the social contract. For example, there are religious sects that dictate specific political arrangements.
As for the diversity you speak of, I think it can be plausibly argued that many utopian conceptions of life really reduce to utilitarianism or hedonism. Diversity manifests in having different options for pleasure or utility. For a lot of people, that's inadequate.
I happen to be a philosophical liberal, and do not wish to live under a theocracy. Nonetheless, I think the fact that many of the highest aspirations of liberal philosophy amount to "having a good time" is a great risk that must be reckoned with, for it can undo the entire liberal project.
I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article.
Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.
Examples
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.
I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.
This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.
It might be a bad translation of a translation, i.e., maybe Absconding With Style is a translation from Russian of weird choice of translation of Sleeper Service _into_ Russian? Bit a stretch I'll grant.
I don't know why Russian is mentioned, that Boris the Brave guy is not Russian, but "Sleeper Service" was oddly translated in the Russian publication as "Спальный Состав", which means "Sleeping composition".
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Eh, I mean Gurgeh was borderline, and a number of other Culture characters are extremely maladjusted (particularly the drones, actually).
> But the existence of post-scarcity in-vitro development means you could raise an army of clones if you wanted, and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs. The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.
Or just that that would be an absolutely _bizarre_ thing to do and that someone unstable enough to do it probably wouldn't last long.
> and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs
IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.
> or is interested in simulating sentient life.
There are at least two storylines about that and significant discussion of the ethics (the Culture at best doesn't approve and may see it as a crime).
> The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown.
Again, it's explicitly mentioned at least once that the minds struggle with doing extremely nasty stuff (which makes sense; there's definitely _some_ alignment going on), and that SC is a tool for that.
I don't disagree that you can read the Culture as a dystopia (though it's a lot less obvious a reading than it would be for, say the Star Trek Federation, which could easily be read as a military junta with good PR), but most of their points aren't particularly compelling.
I really enjoyed the Culture novels but my takeaway was similar to OP's.
The citizens are essentially pets that the Minds really like and take care of.
They have almost no real agency though besides what the Minds will humor.
The Culture would continue to chug along with our with out the humans, the minds would just be bored until they created some other race to entertain themselves with.
As someone recently starting (and coming near the end of) the Culture series, I oftem find myself thinking about the course of action humanity might choose if AGI is reached. Frankly, I think the popular sentiment and path of least resistance will be 'let the Minds handle everything' a la Culture.
It's not a really a choice in the Culture. There is zero chance of the Minds abdicating and submitting to human-only rule.
I doubt it would be a choice with AGI, and certainly not with ASI. It might seem like a choice, because true ASI would be persuasive enough to make it appear that way.
Discontent Culture factions do sometimes break away, though; if letting the minds do everything was unpopular, you'd expect the human population to drain away that way, but that mostly doesn't happen (main example would be the Gzilt, who never quite signed up in the first place).
This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:
CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?
Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/15/iain.banks/ind...
"Special Contact" isn't what they're called. The name is "Special Circumstances".
And the novels point out that the reason you're reading about them, and that's always the situation, is that these are the interesting stories.
So that means you're getting a glimpse of the culture only in the same sense that a James Bond movie tells you about England.
You'd like to think you're seeing Tinker Tailor but you're seeing James Bond. This is a dramatisation of an edge case.
We see brief glimpses in Player of Games (at its very start) and perhaps Inversions (the story about when they were kids) but mostly it's all SC all the time.
Right, definitely important to note the Culture existed for milennia by the earliest (canon chronologically) novel.
Similarly, the fact that Banks didn't write about internal threats other than the ones he wrote about (Eccentric Minds, Absconders, conspiracies to promote specific agendas, etc etc) doesn't mean that others don't exist. An absence of evidence in the text is not evidence of absence (or presence) in the wider universe.
And so fanfic exists.
I think the general reading that the Culture may be an over-controlled dystopia was fully intended as visible by Banks. Often as the viewpoint of a non-Culture... culture that's interacting. It's part of what makes the books so delightful. They invite you to see things multiple ways.
I adore Banks' universe, but recall reading some notes from him years ago, as tialaramex indicated, that 'all the interesting stuff happens at the edge' given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
Even though there's a good amount of utopia-description in the novels, I'd still be wary about extrapolating too much from what are primarily stories of exceptions.
(One might suggest, in response to TFA's expectation there'd be more arseholes in the Culture, that one of the most important things a utopian Culture would ensure is a robust education for all its citizens -- but I realise some popular contemporary earth-bound cultures may take that as a subtle dig.)
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
I'd rate the Eschaton series by Charlie Stross (sadly only two books ever published in that series, and it's unlikely we'll ever see a third) - Singularity Sky & Iron Sunrise - in this category.
I think Accelerando might fit, too.
You're probably referring to A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks [1]
[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
Most of the members of the human race present on Earth, Jupiter, Saturn etc. during the events of Accelerando are murdered by their posthuman descendants. This includes the vat-grown population of conservative humans used to sway the electoral outcomes of the gas giant societies, who were murdered after they had served their use of swaying those societies.
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
There are some _very_ interesting examples in John C. Wright's Count to the Eschaton sequence.
Pure power fantasy & gratuitous as heck, but man, loved the The Golden Oecumene series, Wright's debut novels. Had not thought to see what else Wright has done!
Side note, my homelabs Kube cluster's naming scheme is AI from fiction. Rhadamanthus is one of the computers from Golden Oecumene, a powerful manor computer. Also in the cluster: Jarvis (Iron Man), Cohen (Spin State), Epicac (eponymous Vonnegut short story).
> given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias. It's more that writing convincing utopias is hard and people are lazy.
How so? In this context, “tedious” clearly means “not very exciting for the reader.” Were you hoping for more relationship drama, or romance? I’d be down for that. Though, it doesn’t seem to be what Banks was most interested in writing about.
>> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
Neal Asher did pretty well with his Polity universe. Besides AIs with some capacity for playful violence (Agent Cormac thread, but always there), we also get crablike aliens (the Prador war) and very weird biology (in particular the Spatterjay water world).
Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" might qualify, if you look at it right.
Well, depending on whether you view Kern as an AI at all. She certainly wouldn't thank you for implying it.
Good attempt, but I would still jump into that sugar cage in a heartbeat (of one of my multiple redundant blood pumping organs).
I believe the culture does allow organic life to upgrade to a culture mind. I think I read that somewhere. Of course you wouldn't be you anymore, but you have options and that always made it a pretty malleable cage you can slip out of including just leaving.
So you still have freedom of self...just not much power to shape your civilization. Most of us don't have that anyway and at some level I think I'd be ok giving that up to a group of super intelligences so I can spend more time doing the things I enjoy.
It feels refreshing to see someone sort of agreeing with something I've been saying for years.
I do feel the writer is missing one important aspect though: self-governance and having the decisions of humans matter. Horza Gobulchul was right. By relying on machines to do our decisions for us and having them take control of society, we lose a large part of what makes us human.
Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable. Human level intelligence probably just can't operate a Culture level technology base, and certainly not competitively with civs that do use Mind level AIs. So it's not a matter of whether to have them, it's how to do that.
> Sure, but given a universe in which Mind level AIs exist and many other civilizations have them, not having them and the attendant advantages probably just isn't viable.
That doesn't _really_ seem to be the case, though. Notably, the Gzilt don't have them, but nor did the Idirians.
I don't think the Idiran lack of Mind level AIs and them losing are co-incidental.
The Gzilt did have their own approach, using virtualised and hyper-accelerated crew. We're not told much more about that and how it works, so it's hard to say, but it can't be anywhere near as efficient and capable as using Minds.
To be a human person is to have:
* autonomy
* internal (mental) sovereigneity
* some degree of legibility to other human persons (e.g. a name, capacity to enter social games, a consistent personal history)
* a tolerance for information throughput within the normal distribution of human persons
The Culture abandons 1 and maybe 2, while the VO from Accelerando abandon 4. I've never seen any proof that the universe is privileged to permit all four to coexist indefinitely under conditions of social acceleration.
The question is, what do autonomy and mental sovereignty consist of when we're talking about massively genetically engineered citizens, and outright engineered minds (designed by other minds). It's a question I've been considering for a while since I switched from considering myself a hard determinist, to being a compatibilist.
I think the key differentiator for true autonomy is open ended psychological flexibility. That is, sufficient deliberative control over our own mental processes and decision making faculties to be able to adapt them to whatever experiences we have, and whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
We are introspective beings able to inspect our own mental processes, consider our own motivations, priorities and beliefs, and adapt these based on new experiences. On the one hand this means we are very largely shaped by our experiences of the world, on the other hand it means we are not completely locked into the same limited set of behaviours and responses regardless of what experiences we have, and therefore what we learn. I think that our basic biology and psychology do limit this flexibility in important ways, but I do believe that we've just about reached the level where we are in principle capable of open ended mental flexibility.
If the Culture has a similar understanding of mental autonomy, that means that they could consider Culture citizens autonomous while also recognising that the vast majority of them would in fact remain completely satisfied with life in the Culture. In fact, in principle engineering Culture citizens in that way would be an ethical thing to do, because they would in principle still have the ability to adapt in terms of their beliefs and goals in response to changes in circumstances.
Likewise with Minds. A major difference being that the Minds can anticipate most of the experiences average citizens will have within the Culture and how they would behave, whereas Minds have much more varied experiences and much more capable mental resources, and therefore the ability to anticipate their likely resulting opinions, beliefs and behaviours would be much more limited.
I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do. As I recall, the worst punishment you can get in the culture is being "Drone Slapped," which is just to have a drone follow you around and make sure you don't do any bad stuff (like kill more people if you are a murderer who wants to kill more people). This preserves considerably more autonomy than, for instance, a life sentence in prison.
I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
Most chiefdoms, proto-monarchies and monarchies in human history have had totally inalienable rights for a select few people and it's arguable to say that some states in the world today continue that tradition.
A more grounded criticism, however, is that in the modern world the range of lifestyles and careers available to most free adults is circumscribed only by their wealth, health, the laws of nature and the ability of other humans to enforce prohibitions. Competition from existing political units already exists, but nobody has it guaranteed that if they formed a new polity it would merely be a kayfabe contained inside one or more existing states.
(I think the Culture doing this is a good thing, incidentally, but it does count as removing #1.)
>> To be a human person is to have:
>> * autonomy
>> * internal (mental) [sovereignty]
> I don't think its credible to represent the culture as abandoning 1, at least no more so than our cultures do.
> I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.
No. I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.
So they try their best to preserve the illusion of 1 and 2, while doing away with them as much as possible.
It's kind of unavoidable, from what I remember of the Culture series the Minds are a self-improving superintelligence that was created initially by humans, so denying them full rights would be unforgivable.
In that particular story the irony is that the strategy he thinks is all machines was largely dreamed up by Fal 'Ngeestra.
Whether the culture stories set later also have referers like Fal involved is unclear.
> But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting
> novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me
> that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.
It's not clear to me that reading the Culture series as an "ambiguous" utopia is counter to the intended reading. There is a multitude of instances in the books that show clearly the downsides of living in a utopia where every possible want is met. The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories. In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something. In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
> In Excession, it’s explained that Minds do rarely drift far enough to go rogue
> and are destroyed by the Culture. In other words, these superhuman minds have
> not solved alignment, and they cannot/will not inspect each other to determine
> misalignment before malicious action is taken.
The Culture doesn't even seem very interested in dealing with minds that do go rogue. In the same novel - Excession -, the GSV Grey Area openly violates Culture ethics, and nobody (or noship) seems to feel compelled to do anything about it.
I did a lot of thinking after that and now regret my actions.
> The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories.
You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.
Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
The Idirans were right all along.
I have to admit to a soft spot for the Affront. Terrible terrible people, but they did seem to be enjoying life more than anyone else.
> I have to admit to a soft spot for the Affront. Terrible terrible people, but they did seem to be enjoying life more than anyone else.
Honestly, I didn't really enjoy them. Except for that shape-shifter, Banks seemed to tend to write anyone who doesn't subscribe to his utopia as a grotesque cartoon.
Make the Affront Great Again
This reminds me of the thought of Isaiah Berlin, political philosopher and historian of ideas; utopian philosophies often conclude that there if there is a "right" way to live, i.e. a maximally rational way of life, then utopia will consist of everyone converging on this lifestyle. For a certain type of person, this monistic vision of life annihilates pluralism, optionality, and genuine diversity. Berlin himself espoused value pluralism, the idea that there are an infinite number of fundamental human values and ideals for which once can be deeply committed but can also be at conflict and mutually exclusive with one another.
That's unconvincing, because there's a very clear difference between a lifestyle and a social contract.
Social contracts sketch social relationships in very broad terms. You can still have plenty of lifestyle diversity and plurality within them.
In fact you need a social contract to have any kind of diversity.
Otherwise a culture reliably degenerates into autocracy, which isn't known for its tolerance.
That itself a distinctly modern framing. For many ancients, there was no such division; the way one lived was deeply entangled with the social contract. For example, there are religious sects that dictate specific political arrangements.
As for the diversity you speak of, I think it can be plausibly argued that many utopian conceptions of life really reduce to utilitarianism or hedonism. Diversity manifests in having different options for pleasure or utility. For a lot of people, that's inadequate.
I happen to be a philosophical liberal, and do not wish to live under a theocracy. Nonetheless, I think the fact that many of the highest aspirations of liberal philosophy amount to "having a good time" is a great risk that must be reckoned with, for it can undo the entire liberal project.
I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article.
Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.
Examples
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.
I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.
This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.
I could go on...
> I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
If they're including breakaway Cultures (Zetetic Elench etc), maybe you can get there, but otherwise, yeah, 1% seems very, very high.
It might be a bad translation of a translation, i.e., maybe Absconding With Style is a translation from Russian of weird choice of translation of Sleeper Service _into_ Russian? Bit a stretch I'll grant.
I don't know why Russian is mentioned, that Boris the Brave guy is not Russian, but "Sleeper Service" was oddly translated in the Russian publication as "Спальный Состав", which means "Sleeping composition".
I haven't read the books, but I assume that the meaning of "состав" used here may be "train / a set of train cars".
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Eh, I mean Gurgeh was borderline, and a number of other Culture characters are extremely maladjusted (particularly the drones, actually).
> But the existence of post-scarcity in-vitro development means you could raise an army of clones if you wanted, and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs. The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.
Or just that that would be an absolutely _bizarre_ thing to do and that someone unstable enough to do it probably wouldn't last long.
> and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs
IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.
> or is interested in simulating sentient life.
There are at least two storylines about that and significant discussion of the ethics (the Culture at best doesn't approve and may see it as a crime).
> The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown.
Again, it's explicitly mentioned at least once that the minds struggle with doing extremely nasty stuff (which makes sense; there's definitely _some_ alignment going on), and that SC is a tool for that.
I don't disagree that you can read the Culture as a dystopia (though it's a lot less obvious a reading than it would be for, say the Star Trek Federation, which could easily be read as a military junta with good PR), but most of their points aren't particularly compelling.
I really enjoyed the Culture novels but my takeaway was similar to OP's. The citizens are essentially pets that the Minds really like and take care of. They have almost no real agency though besides what the Minds will humor.
The Culture would continue to chug along with our with out the humans, the minds would just be bored until they created some other race to entertain themselves with.
As someone recently starting (and coming near the end of) the Culture series, I oftem find myself thinking about the course of action humanity might choose if AGI is reached. Frankly, I think the popular sentiment and path of least resistance will be 'let the Minds handle everything' a la Culture.
It's not a really a choice in the Culture. There is zero chance of the Minds abdicating and submitting to human-only rule.
I doubt it would be a choice with AGI, and certainly not with ASI. It might seem like a choice, because true ASI would be persuasive enough to make it appear that way.
Discontent Culture factions do sometimes break away, though; if letting the minds do everything was unpopular, you'd expect the human population to drain away that way, but that mostly doesn't happen (main example would be the Gzilt, who never quite signed up in the first place).
Yes, however unrealistic it may be, several factions in the Culture universe do claim to be the masters of their Minds, or refuse to instantiate them.