[austinl]

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.

[elihu]

I suppose its ainteresting that in the Culture, human intelligence and artificial intelligence are consistently kept separate and distinct, even when it becomes possible to perfectly record a person's consciousness and execute it without a body within a virtual environment.

One could imagine Banks could have described Minds whose consciousness was originally derived from a human's, but extended beyond recognition with processing capabilities far in excess of what our biological brains can do. I guess as a story it's more believable that an AI could be what we'd call moral and good if it's explicitly non-human. Giving any human the kind of power and authority that a Mind has sounds like a recipe for disaster.

[idiotsecant]

https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Gzilt

Banks did consider this. The Gzilt were a quite powerful race who had no AI. Instead they emulated groups of biological intelligences on faster hardware, in a sort of group mind type machine.

[theptip]

Yes, the problem is that from a narrative perspective a story about post-humans would be neither relatable nor comprehensible.

Personally I think the transhumanist evolution is a much more likely positive outcome than “humans stick around and befriend AIs”, of all the potential positive AGI scenarios.

Some sort of Renunciation (Butlerian Jihad, and/or totalitarian ban on genetic engineering) is the other big one, but it seems you’d need a near miss like Skynet or Dune’s timelines to get everybody to sign up to such a drastic Renunciation, and that is probably quite apocalyptic, so maybe doesn’t count as a “positive outcome”.

[tialaramex]

I don't see why post-humans can't be relatable even though they'd be very distant from our motivations.

Take Greg Egan's "Glory". I don't think we're told the Amalgam citizens in the story are in some sense human descendants but it seems reasonable to presume so. Our motives aren't quite like theirs, I don't think any living human would make those choices, but I have feelings about them anyway.

[theptip]

I haven’t read that one, will check it out. If we take his “Permutation City”, I think the character Peer is quite unrelatable, and only then because they give some human background. A story consisting only of creatures hacking their own reward functions makes motivations more alien than “not quite like ours” IMO.

I assume post-humans will be smarter and unlock new forms of cognition. For example BCI to connect directly to the Internet or other brains seems plausible. So in the same way that a blind person cannot relate to a sighted person on visual art, or an IQ 75 person is unlikely to be able to relate to an IQ 150 person on the elegance of some complex mathematical theorem, I assume there will be equivalent barriers.

But I think the first point around motivation hacking is the crux for me. I would assume post-humans will fundamentally change their desires (indeed I believe that conditional on there being far more technologically advanced post-humans, they almost certainly _must_ have removed much of the ape-mind, lest it force them into conflict with existential stakes.)

[stoneforger]

The Meatfucker acts as a vigilante and is unpopular because of the privacy invasions. The Zetetic Elench splintered off. The Culture's morals were tested in the Idiran war. They might not have greed as a driver because it's unnecessary but they do have freedom of choice so they're not exactly saints.

[akira2501]

> AI exceeding human capabilities is inevitable

It can right now. This isn't the problem. The problem is the power budget and efficiency curve. "Self-contained power efficient AI with a long lasting power source" is actually several very difficult and entropy averse problems all rolled into one.

It's almost as if all the evolutionary challenges that make humans what we are will also have to be solved for this future to be remotely realizable. In which case, it's just a new form of species competition, between one species with sexual dimorphism and differentiation and one without. I know what I'd bet on.

[adriand]

> the series explores how people might find meaning in life when ultimately everything can be done better by machines.

Your comment reminds me of Nick Land's accelerationism theory, summarized here as follows:

> "The most essential point of Land’s philosophy is the identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence: they are one and the same thing apprehended from different temporal vantage points. What we understand as a market based economy is the chaotic adolescence of a future AI superintelligence," writes the author of the analysis. "According to Land, the true protagonist of history is not humanity but the capitalist system of which humans are just components. Cutting humans out of the techno-economic loop entirely will result in massive productivity gains for the system itself." [1]

Personally, I question whether the future holds any particular difference for the qualitative human experience. It seems to me that once a certain degree of material comfort is attained, coupled with basic freedoms of expression/religion/association/etc., then life is just what life is. Having great power or great wealth or great influence or great artistry is really just the same-old, same-old, over and over again. Capitalism already runs my life, is capitalism run by AIs any different?

1: https://latecomermag.com/article/a-brief-history-of-accelera...

[Vecr]

Or Robin Hanson, a professional economist and kind of a Nick Land lite, who's published more recently. That's where the carbon robots expanding at 1/3rd the speed of light comes from.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I just want to add that I think you might be missing an component of that optimal life idea. We often neglect to consider that in order to exercise freedom, one must have time in which to choose freely. I’d argue that a great deal of leisure, if not the complete abolition of work, would be a major prerequisite to reaching that optimal life.

[johnnyjeans]

Banks' Culture isn't capitalist in the slightest. It is however, very humanist.

If you want a vision of the future (multiple futures, at that) which differs from the liberal, humanist conception of man's destiny, Baxter's Xeelee sequence is a great contemporary. Baxter's ability to write a compelling human being is (in my opinion) very poor, but when it comes to hypothesizing about the future, he's far more interesting of an author. Without spoilers, it's a series that's often outright disturbing. And it certainly is a very strong indictment to the self-centered narcissism that the post-enlightenment ideology of liberalism is anything but yet another stepping stone on an eternal evolution of human beings. The exceptionally alien circumstances that are detailed undermine the idea of a qualitative human experience entirely.

I think the contemporary focus on economics is itself a facet of modernism that will eventually disappear. Anything remotely involving the domain rarely shows up in Baxter's work. It's really hard to give a shit about it given the monumental scale and metaphysical nature of his writing.

[adriand]

> I think the contemporary focus on economics is itself a facet of modernism that will eventually disappear. Anything remotely involving the domain rarely shows up in Baxter's work. It's really hard to give a shit about it given the monumental scale and metaphysical nature of his writing.

I’m curious to check it out. But in terms of what I’m trying to say, I’m not making a point about economics, I’m making a point about the human experience. I haven’t read these books, but most sci-fi novels on a grand scale involve very large physical structures, for example. A sphere built around a star to collect all its energy, say. But not mentioned is that there’s Joe, making a sandwich, gazing out at the surface of the sphere, wondering what his entertainment options for the weekend might be.

In other words, I’m not persuaded that we are heading for transcendence. Stories from 3,000 years ago still resonate for us because life is just life. For the same reason, life extension doesn’t really seem that appealing either. 45 years in, I’m thinking that another 45 years is about all I could take.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Glad to see someone else who liked those books. I’m only a few in, but so far they’re pretty great.

[johnnyjeans]

The ending of Ring, particularly having everything contextualized after reading all the way to the end of the Destiny's Children sub-series, remains one of the most strikingly beautiful pieces I've ever seen a Sci-Fi author pull off.

Easily the best "hard" Sci-Fi I've read. Baxter's imaginination and grasp of the domains he writes about is phenomenal.

[calf]

But OP and Horza's viewpoints are the same strawman argument. The sci-fi premise is that superhuman AIs coexist with humans which are essentially ants.

The correct question is, then what ought to be the best outcome for humans? And a benevolent coexistence where the Culture actually gives humans lots of space and autonomy (contrary their misinformed and wrong view that the Culture takes away human autonomy) is indeed the most optimal solution. It is in fact in this setting that humans nevertheless retain their individual humanity instead of taking some transhumanist next step.