Banks' work assumes that AI exceeding human capabilities is inevitable, and the series explores how people might find meaning in life when ultimately everything can be done better by machines. For example, the protagonist in Player of Games gets enjoyment from playing board games, despite knowing that AI can win in every circumstance.

For all of the apocalyptic AI sci-fi that's out there , Banks' work stands out as a positive outcome for humanity (if you accept that AI acceleration is inevitable).

But I also think Banks is sympathetic to your viewpoint. For example, Horza, the protagonist in the first novel, Consider Phlebas, is notably anti-Culture. Horza sees the Culture as hedonists who are unable to take anything seriously, whose actions are ultimately meaningless without spiritual motivation. I think these were the questions that Banks was trying to raise.

The way I interpret the philosophy of the minds is a bit different.

Some seem to conform to your analysis here, but many seem deeply compassionate toward the human condition. I always felt like part of what banks was saying was that, no matter the level of intelligence, humanity and morality had some deep truths that were hard to totally trancend. And that a humam perspective could be useful and maybe even insightful even in the face of vast unimaginable intelligence. Or maybe that wisdom was accessible to lower life forms than the minds.

How much of this is because it’s a bad future, and how much of this is because in any future with super-powerful artificial intelligences the upside for human achievement is going to be capped? Or to put it differently: would you rather live in the Culture or in one of the alternative societies it explores (some within the Culture itself) where they opt for fewer comforts, but more primitive violence and warfare —- knowing at the end of the day, you’re still never going to have mastery of the universe?

There's a counterargument to this conception of freedom; what are we supposed to compare the settings of Banks' novels to? Looking at the distribution of rights and responsibilities, humans are effectively kept as pets by states today and we just don't ascribe sapience to states.

I think this exact sentiment is explained over and over why people leave the Culture in the books. And why they don't actually have to -- full freedom to do literally anything is given to you as an individual of the Culture. There's effectively no difference in what freedom of personal choice you're afforded whether you're a part of the Culture or whether you leave it.

You're wrong in saying that everything important about human life is decided by the Minds. The Minds respect, care and love their human charges. It's not a high lords - peasants relationship, it's a grown-up children take care of their elderly parents.

And you can leave. There always parts of the Culture splitting up or joining back. You can request and get a ship with Star Trek-level AI and go on your merry way.

The vast majority of humanity would disagree with you. And in fact, this is how the vast majority of humans live today.

"humans are left to nibble at the margins and dance to the tune of their betters." Isn't that society today, but without the wealth of Culture society?

That's no worse than how the large majority of humans live now, under masters far less kind and caring than the Culture Minds. The fact that our masters are humans like us, and I could, theoretically (but not practically), become one of them, doesn't really make it any better.

how we handle ai will dramatically shape our future.

if you consider many of the great post-ai civilizations in sci-fi (matrix, foundation, dune, culture, blade runner, etc.), they're all shaped by the consequences of ai:

   - matrix: ai won and enslaved humans. 
   - foundation: humans won and a totalitarian empire banned ai, leading to the inevitable fall of trantor bc nobody could understand the whole system. 
   - dune: humans won (butlerian jihad) and ai was banned by the great houses, which led to the rise of mentats. 
   - culture series: benign ai (minds) run the utopian civilization according to western values.

which future would you prefer?

There are less than benign godlike entities in that imagined future, for example the Excession and some of the Sublimed. That adds an additional layer to the narrative.

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

Freedom is never absolute. We will always be subject to some higher power. Even if it is only physics. The humans in the Culture seem at least as free as we are.

Sounds like Bora Horza's argument against the Culture.

The author admits to not liking "Consider Phlebas," which is the most original and captivating of the Culture series.

It seems like a cop-out. The interesting part of real-world culture is how it reflects a community’s circumstances. For example, herding and pastoral cultures have sharp distinctions with subsistence farming cultures. In real societies, culture is a way to adapt groups of people to the world around them.

If you just have omniscient gods control society, then culture becomes meaningless. There is no reason to explore what cultural adaptations might arise in a spacefaring society.

Is it really contrived? It feels to me like an inevitable consequence of sufficiently advanced AI. In that regard the Culture is in some sense the best of all possible futures. Humans may be pets, but they are extremely well cared for pets.

> Everything important about the flow of human life is decided by the mighty ship minds; humans are left to nibble at the margins and dance to the tune of their betters.

Dajeil Gelian spends something like 40 years bending the Sleeper Service to her will in Excession. The helplessness of the Minds to override free will is kind of a core theme of Excession IMO

It gets at a profound question which is related to the problem of evil: is it better to make a bad world good (whatever those terms might mean for you) than for the world just to have been good the whole time?

Is it better to have suffering and scarcity because that affords meaning to life in overcoming those challenges?

There's a paradoxical implication, which is that if overcoming adversity is what gives life meaning, then what seems to be the goal state, which is to overcome those problems, robs life of meaning, which would seem to be a big problem.

The hope is maybe that there are levels of achievement or expansions to consciousness which would present meaningful challenges even when the more mundane ones are taken care of.

As far as the Culture's own answer goes, what aspects of agency or meaningful activity that you currently pursue would you be unable to pursue in the Culture?

And as far as possible futures go, if we assume that at some point there will be machines that far surpass human intelligence, we can't hope for much better than that they be benign.

At the limits of what seems likely to be feasible with atomically precise manufacturing and chemical energy scale technology, you arrive at something similar to a somewhat slower Star Trek replicator, able to produce on demand in under an hour more or less any food item(s) and tools/knick-knacks/products anyone anywhere has ever created (likely food would mostly be its own machine). It's a world where disease is functionally eliminated, and it's plausible that barring accidents you might live for thousands of years. Energy is massively available from ultra-efficient solar panels and fusion reactors easily assembled by limited machines from parts printed out of industrial replicators. Used materials get recycled down to smaller components with very high efficiency, and damaged components get recycled down to molecular components and reformed into new ones.

What human agency, in the way that you mean it, exists in such a world that doesn't in the Culture? You don't have Minds, but you don't really need them for a world without disease, poverty, or scarcity to basically anything. No one's life would really mean anything, because everyone would have everything they could want. Eventually, we will have mastered all technologies that can be developed. The world will be finished. The only thing left is to wander around the universe in giant ships with all the comforts of home, playing games, etc.

You can get ~99.9% of the world of the Culture without superintelligence. Just fast forward current normal human development a few hundred years and you get the same world where all instrumental value of things ceases to exist, where very little remains to be discovered, and nothing you do is going to meaningfully change anything except what happens to you and those who care about you.

Of course even now, arguably, that's the case for virtually everyone.

> You might want to live there, but I wouldn't. Virtually all humans in the books [...] are kept as pets by the ships, for amusement, basically as clowns.

I got the impression that the Minds are proud of how many humans choose to live in their GSV or Orbital, when they are free to live anywhere and they appear to care deeply about humans in general and often individuals too.

Also, the Minds are not perfect Gods. They have god-like faculties, but they are deliberately created as flawed imperfect beings.

One novel (Consider Phlebas?) explained that The Culture can create perfect Minds, but they tend to be born and then instantly sublime away to more interesting dimensions.

That is literally the viewpoint of the protagonist of Consider Phlebas.

Is that so different than now for all but a few human elites?

I’m not sure how it’s going to be any different for us. We keep saying we’ll be using these tools, but not understanding. The tools aren’t just tools. When they’re smarter than you, you don’t use them. The more you try to enforce control, the more you set up an escape story. There is no similar historical technology.

That's no worse than how the large majority of humans live now, under masters far less caring than the Culture Minds. The fact that our masters are humans like us, and I could, theoretically (but not practically), become one of them, doesn't really make it any better.

The alternatives explored themselves in various permutations and mutilations: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Idiran-Culture_War

>humanoid aliens -- are kept as pets by the ships, for amusement, basically as clowns.

So this is what inspired The Outer Limits: Season 5, Episode 7 'Human Operators' https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/The_Human_Operators

That’s not how I see it at all. The humans do whatever they want, with no limits. Requests are made from human to AI, I can’t remember an instance where an AI told a human to do something. In effect, the AI is an extremely intelligent, capable, willing slave to what humans want (a paradigm hard to imagine playing out in reality).

Reminds me of the "Silicon Valley" quote: "I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do"

You can always leave.

What, exactly, do you want to do that wouldn't be allowed in the Culture?

The Minds use humans as tools for exploring the "psychic" part of reality too (Surface Detail? I forget exactly).

There's that insinuation that humans are specialler than godlike machines.

these are the exact questions he was raising.

i think some version of this future is unfortunately the optimistic outcome or we change ourselves into something unrecognizable

it's literally the best possible outcome for humanity.

I just re-read Surface Detail where some nobody from a backwards planet convinces a ship Mind to help her assassinate her local Elon Musk. So there's some agency to be found in the margins...

Ouch. I don't know the series, but going purely by his article and your post, I find it interesting how he misunderstood socialism as well: The idea was to make a plan where to go as a community, then, if necessary, appoint and follow a coordinator to achieve that goal. The idea was not to submit to some kind of dictator who tells you about which goals you should desire, benelovent or not...

Yes, it has major, major problems.

There's a post here that lists quite a few of the problems:

"Against the Culture" https://archive.is/gv0lG https://www.gleech.org/culture

The main sections I like there are "partial reverse alignment" and "the culture as a replicator", with either this or Why the Culture Wins talking about what happens when the Culture runs out of moral patients.

"Partial reverse alignment" means brainwashing/language control/constraints on allowed positions in the space of all minds, by the way.

You can think what you want about the Culture, and more crudely blatant gamer fantasies like the Optimalverse stuff and Yudkowsky's Fun Sequences, but I consider them all near 100% eternal loss conditions. The Culture's a loss condition anyway because there's no actual humans in it, but even if you swapped those in it's still a horrible end.

Edit: the optimalverse stuff is really only good if you want to be shocked out of the whole glob of related ideas, assuming you don't like the idea of being turned into a brainwashed cartoon pony like creature. Otherwise avoid it.

> Virtually all humans in the books -- and I'm aware of the fact that they're not Earth humans but a wide variety of humanoid aliens -- are kept as pets by the ships, for amusement, basically as clowns.

So like current late stage capitalism, except the AIs are more interested in our comfort than the billionaires are.

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The fact that the Culture was not only willing to use very powerful general AI but allow it to run the entire civilisation, whereas the Idirans banned it, might have been a factor. No matter how smart Idirans might be presumably Minds would have a significant edge

Excession deals with this. It involves the Culture and "The Affront" which is a spacefaring but savage civilization that some people in the Culture dislike. Player of Games is a similar story about a civilization that the Culture dislikes. Those are my two favorite Culture books among my favorite books in general.

The Wikipedia articles about the books goes into spoiler-heavy details about the Culture's interaction with those civilizations.

I think the reason is that the Culture has been around long enough to attain a level of technological development at which most civilizations sublime and simply stop participating in what we call material existence. The Culture could do so but has chosen not to do so (at least not collectively; individual people and minds sublime on a regular basis).

A lot of the civilizations that would be militarily or economically more powerful than the culture aren't a problem because they've already sublimed.

The culture triumphs because it is a technological super power. It is a technological super power because the minds (the super AIs running everything) are given free reign (and presumably most of its industrial base is used to create more minds, and develop more industry).

I've always gotten the impression that the resources dedicated to maintaining and serving the humans in the culture empire are dwaft by the resources invested into developing their science and AI.

(I mean basically they have Von Neumann machines controlling whole star systems, obviously this level of industry beats most biological enemies)

It's worth noting though that there are several other cultures/species that are more advanced than the culture though. E.g., the ascended species that stewards the tomb worlds (and is in essence like a god compared to the culture). There are many other examples.

I don't think it was ever claimed that the culture was predestined to be the strongest, or anything like that.

That's a big part of the stories. Special Circumstances nudges other civilizations towards the Culture's leanings (see player of games, surface detail) as they're climbing the technology ladder.

I think answers in response to your post will differ depending on whether or not you've read many of the Culture books -- to me it kind of sounds like you have, but it also kind of sounds like you haven't.

If you haven't, I would recommend Player of Games, which is one of the few culture novels I have read, but which I think deals with this topic directly as the main idea of the book.

If you have read it, it's possible your criticism is running deeper and you feel the way it's handled in that book is handwavey. I can't really address that criticism, it's perfectly valid! I'm not sure if other books do any better of a job, but it felt on par to Asimov writing political/military intrigue in Foundation: entertaining and a little cute, if somewhat shallow.

> Vinge takes a similar approach, constructing his big bad from an obviously-not-equivalent antagonist, sidestepping the direct comparison.

I'd argue A Fire Upon the Deep clearly has the antagonist winning, and the life we recognize is only saved by basically staying within a safe area of the galaxy. You haven't conquered the monster just because you're safe under your blanket.

the mechanics of cooperation probably scale better than those of defection, by their nature. Defectors need to pay higher costs guarding themselves against the other defectors, and always trying to figure out how they are going to pick the right defections for themselves to win.

I don't think Culture's philosophy has been the driving factor behind its dominance and military advantage. I think the anarchy utopia is the side effect of the Culture minds being at the developmental peak over other civilizations.

I always assumed that Infinite Fun Space was used by the Minds to pre-emptively model any potential conflict.

Agreed about being able to skip the island sequence in _Consider Phlebas_. I recently reread the book after many years, and in my memory that section looms large, and I expected it to be 100 pages. But it's ~20. It was much easier the second time around, and I think it serves to underscore how committed the Culture is to personal agency, to the extent that if citizens wish to give themselves over to an absurdly evil charismatic leader, no-one will stop them. There was also something interesting about the mind on the shuttle on standby, its almost toddler-like character, told "not to look" at the goings on on the island by the orbital. And its innocent, trusting self is eventually murdered by Horza during the escape, adding some black dark pigment to Horza's already complex character hue.

I love Consider Phlebas, it’s a right old romp, the pace always pulls me right in.

Surface Detail or Use of Weapons qualifies. Although Use of Weapons was written much earlier than released, IIRC.

I like Consider Phlebas too. I'm not sure why so many say they don't like it. Player of Games was not one of my favourites, but I might read it again at some point to see what I missed. I actually really liked Inversions despite being generally the least well regarded Culture book.

>taking what we have now and sublimating to a higher level

That's fine, the Culture is really against sublimating

Going by AI theory Banks failed that hard. I suspect he knew that, due to his tricks with language, but that doesn't mean he successfully predicted a plausible future, even in broad strokes. The singularity is called the singularity for a reason, and even when you throw economists at it you tend to get machine civilizations (though, maybe partially squishy and probably made from carbon instead of silicon) expanding at 1/3rd the speed of light. No culture there.

I really loved Quantum Thief, with it's Accelerando-like scope & scale of expansion, but mixed with such weird/eccentric/vibrant local mythos of the world, such history.

Without my prompting it ended up in our local sci-fi/fantasy book club's rotation a couple months back, and there was some enjoyment but overall the major mood seemed to be pretty befuddled and confused, somewhat hurt at some of the trauma/bad (which isn't better in book 2!). But man, it worked so well for me. As you say, a very deep end book. But there's so much fun stuff packed in, such vibes; I loved puzzling it through the first time, being there for the ride, and found only more to dig into the next time.

Still feels very different from Banks, where "space hippies with guns" has such a playful side. Quantum Thief is still a story of a solar system, and pressures within it, but there's such amorphous & vast extends covered by the Culture, so many many things happening in that universe. The books get to take us through Special Cirumstances, through such interesting edge cases, where-as the polot of Quantum Thief orbits the existing major powers of the universe.

The Quantum Thief is the kind of scifi where anything is possible if you call it "quantum" something; not a huge fan.

I think the implication is Culture humanoids are all cyborgs. Their technology doesn't follow "a dude with a metal arm" cyberpunk fashion, but they seem all physically well superior to naturally-grown organic humanoids.

https://medium.com/@Fares_Mohamed_Amine/demystifying-neural-...

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=2993

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1881

Transhumanism is just rich people babble

I think Revelation Space does a great job creating a universe that squeezes out novel human cultures through the crushing vice of selection pressure. It’s every bit as daring as The Culture, just a different vibe!

It's decent. I just find Alastair Reynolds a bad observer of humans though... He paints jarringly bad portaits of humans, e.g., in one of his books he has the mercenaries hand wringing about how they can't be morally shady despite the whole fate of the human race depending on them acting decisively. It's is a really naive depiction of how humans actually act under pressure.

I have similar issues with the Three Body problem.

Iain Banks' Horror, non-SF stuff is great. Like you I enjoyed The Wasp Factory. Also, The Bridge. We lost him far too young.

edit: and if you enjoyed Banks' Horror you'll probably get into Dan Simmons' stuff, another SF (Hyperion) and Horror writer. The Song of Kali was excellent.

It's probably not possible to really do it. You could play something like Swat 4 while role-playing an one of the Special Circumstances agents I guess? You can switch between the views of each member of your team, use a fiber optic device to look under doors, sometimes have snipers set up, and look through their scopes/take shots.

Lots of what we see "on screen" (but obviously it's a book) is really a somewhat detail-less alien action book dressed up as 1990s Earth (that's why the characters are called humans, and why certain things are described inaccurately).

A good entry in an action game series started in the 90s isn't a bad bet. As I said, it's close to what good parts of the books portray themselves as anyway.

Play SimCity or Civilization and contemplate what your relationship is to each of the sims or population units digitally represented in the game is. That would be the difference in level of consciousness between the Minds and ordinary humans like you and I. You are making those crude representations of beings in game happy, protecting them from outside threats, and generally looking out for their well being but your ability to relate to them or converse with them as equals with them will never be any different.

Can’t think of one. Maybe something like Commander Blood - high concept space opera, focus on alien interactions, humourous & quirky. But it’s also nothing like it.

If you like puzzles, look at The Talos Principle 2. It's mainly about asking whether humanity should even try to control the physical universe and spread life, or focus on sustainability and safety. The Culture itself referenced a couple of times in it.

Interesting question. Stellaris is the clear choice if you're into grand strategy, you can be an AI-led multi-cultural civilization (starting or become one) with Culture-like win conditions. Endless Space II is another option that's turn-based and a little more approachable.

Mass Effect has a lot of fun with a galactic society. If you like the crew-based action of Consider Phlebas and want more of a story then that or (believe it or not) the Guardians of the Galaxy game that came out a couple of years ago are good choices.

Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077 tackles trans-humanism to an extent but they're Earth-bound. Primordia is a point-and-click adventure where humans are extinct and our creations live on. I could probably think of some more but the dinner alarm is going off!

I also failed to appreciate Consider Phlebas, on the other hand I liked Wasp Factory very much.

Well, let us see Player of Games.

I think it is pretty clearly a utopia. It's a post scarcity society, where humans still live meaningful lives (despite being outclassed completely by AI). It's about as best as one can do in a post scarcity society with super intelligence.

The interesting and unique aspect of the series, is that Banks manages to write interesting stories about a utopia.

I wonder could you even write post scarcity utopia that was actually utopia... Culture might remove lot of freedom, but also it also does allow comfortable living for those who don't care.

It's not a dystopia, which is a maximally negative state, but I also always found it pretty comical to call it utopian.

A decent chunk of the stories has the reader follow around Special Circumstances, which is effectively a sort of space CIA interfering in the affairs of other cultures. The entire plot of Player of Games, spoiler alert for people who haven't read it, is that both the protagonist of the story, as well as the reader by the narrator, have been mislead and used as a pawn to facilitate the overthrow of the government of another civilization which afterwards collapses into chaos.

To me you can straight up read most of the books as satire on say, a Fukuyama-esque America of the late 20th century rather than a futuristic utopia.

How so?

When I read Surface Detail a few years ago, I swear something Musk tweeted near that time made me think he had also read it and identified with Joiler Veppers, the antagonist.

I've always suspected he never actually read them, everything about the Culture seems to fly in the face of his hard working, sleep on the factory floor, great man proganist values, though I'm sure he'd admire the tech and it would give him ideas for what to promise next. Can't remember which novel but in one of them it was made clear most of the population was trans

Banks had very "fast cars, chicks, and drugs" tastes - a "bro" if you will - and much of his work is basically James Bond stories. I'm not sure the fans are surprising.

I'm sure your space program is way better than Elon's.

Lol. The culture is pretty far left (strong super-paternalistic government, equality of outcomes, etc...). I don't think one can draw a serious connection between liking the series and rightwing politics.