A couple of people have mentioned to me: “we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence – utopias like the Culture novels”. And they’re right, AI can be tremendously positive, and some beacons lit into the future could help make that come around.
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.
Most of the novels take the perspective of Culture members, and so fully accept their ideology. We can’t take broad claims about their society as accurate unless they are directly confirmed by the evidence in the books .
A manipulated population
In many ways, the humans of the Culture do not behave like modern humans. This is usually explained as a consequence of post-scarcity – why commit crimes when everything is free and social acceptance is everything; why rush when you can live as long as you like.
But the citizens of Culture are really strangely homogenous. Player of Games gives an example of an rare out-of-distribution citizen – Gurgeh is competitive and uninterested in other people and most aspects of Culture. But he still shares basically all their values. People like him are a dime-a-dozen in present day Earth. There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one. We also see examples of subcultures or even cults, but again by modern standards they are incredibly tame, and are never potentially destabilizing to culture.
Citizens are not actually human, but drawn from several humanoid species, and they outpopulate present-Earth by 5 orders of magnitude so if anything the range of deviation should be much larger.
The conclusion is clear that the population of Culture is carefully controlled to produce the desired outcome. Potentially, the Minds pull this off by a superhumanly effective and subtle propaganda. But I think it is more likely that it was achieved by genetic changes, so that it’s safe to raise full Culture citizens in other cultures. This would be similar meddling to the Culture’s drones, which are human level AIs that have their personalities designed into them at creation, allowing only an acceptable range of behaviours.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the birthrate. Sure, the vast majority of citizens voluntarily choose to only have a replacement level of children. 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. Similarly, it’s strange that no one in Culture modifies themselves into a utility monster, or is interested in simulating sentient life.
What motivates the Minds
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