
Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks - mpweiher
http://sciphijournal.org/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/
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gballan
As the article says, Banks' thing is post-scarcity [1]. It's not too difficult
to imagine PS as one of two possible steady state conditions for us.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
scarcity_economy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy)

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mdekkers
Technically, we are in a position of resource abundance, and ready for a PS
economy. Unfortunately, greed is keeping us down.

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aalleavitch
If we ever want to develop into a Culture-style society, now is exactly the
time when we need to start planning the path to get there.

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ufmace
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.

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aalleavitch
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.

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effie
> Feudalism with energy weapons makes no sense – a feudal society could not
> produce energy weapons, and energy weapons would undermine feudal social
> relations.

I do not follow at all. It is easy to imagine a powerful figure to maintain
feudal order with help of energy weapons.

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ABCLAW
Feudalism is premised upon a ruling class providing their noble/warrior class
with land holdings that they divide among a peasant class that labours, feeds
and pays tithe to the noble/warrior and ruling classes in exchange for their
land holdings.

If the peasant class can fight as effectively as the knights, then why would
you distribute land to an intermediate group for redistribution?

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danieltillett
You mean like the English at Agencourt? There is a reason the English Civil
War happened in England (and not just the obvious). The world would have been
a very different place if the Levellers had won [0].

0\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers)

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thinkingemote
I heard Banks talk once and one thing he said was that the key idea with AI is
that it will be good.

Most of our stories about AI is that it will look at humanity and want to
destroy it. He said that AI in the Culture will look at humanity and actually
like it!

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tremendulo
One problem that all cultures face is that of pecking order. Respecting the
pecking order as animals gave us a lesser chance of death by violence within
the species. But we've inherited the desire to rise up the status hierarchy
and one of the commonest means of doing so is by trying to emulate the most
successful. Unfortunately a high proportion of the most successful people
appear to be sociopaths who seem to feed off of finding new ways to subtly
weaken the culture as a whole.

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aerovistae
They're kind of odd books because mostly their characters and plots are quite
poor-- dull and badly written, and yet the _world_ of the Culture stays with
you because it's SO unique and SO well-crafted.

 _Excession_ is the one book in the series which I found to be EXTREMELY
enjoyable, good characters and all.

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wycs
Player of games is the only one I loved.

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ahartmetz
I agree with aerovistae and I found the plot of Player of Games particularly
weak. Watching the protagonist winning the game thing didn't feel satisfying.
It's hard to get excited about a game you cannot understand because it isn't
explained. And the big "surprise" regarding a certain character towards the
end was lame. It surprised me, a little, only because it seemed too obvious so
I expected something more clever. That said, I liked the book because of the
Culture.

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rini17
Is there any story about the Culture from within? I mean, how do the billions,
that are not involved in Contact, actually live? I suspect we would find that
grossly disgusting, and it would destroy carefully constructed appeal of the
whole civilization.

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aalleavitch
There are plenty of descriptions of life inside The Culture; they essentially
spend their time partying and finding increasingly complex ways to entertain
themselves in an environment free of danger or responsibilities. Banks does
depict plenty of members of the Culture as really shallow individuals, but
their lives are not totally without conflict (largely emotional and
intellectual), and there are plenty of people who decide they want to actually
take on some sort of responsibility (like those who join contact), and people
in the Culture are given that opportunity if they ask for it. One of the great
things about the way Banks depicts the Culture is that within the bounds of
the Culture’s morality people are free to live any way they choose, and even
outside of those bounds they are free to form splinter groups that live
differently (like the Zetetic Elench).

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rini17
Right - no group "within the bunds of Culture morality" is described closely
anywhere. Everything Banks writes about revolves around the Contact or the
fringe groups or other civilizations. We are left to imagination as to "the
homeland", and my imagination makes me wary.

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aalleavitch
Excession and Player of Games both have sections of the book that take place
inside the Culture and show some of their day-to-day lives. They just don’t
spend much time there because there’s relatively little interesting conflict
to show.

