This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
I was planning to write up a larger top-level effort-post on this topic, but since you've already made the top-level I'll post the notes I was drafting.
For the last few days, I've been reading about the Sam Altman attack drama and the warehouse fire attack that happened recently, and I've been finding the reactions pretty scary. General sentiment on HN is something along the lines of "Altman deserved it" and even among my general leftish acquaintance bubble the vibe is along the lines of "they shouldn't have missed" or "we need more of this fuck the rich" which doesn't really bode well for the stability of society.
Whether or not you believe the more bombastic claims of AI CEO's, I do think it's clear that at minimum AI is going to exacerbate the trend of technology centralizing power, wealth and status, even as absolute material standards have continued to improve beyond the wildest dreams of 99.9% of humanity in the past. For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.
Ruling out FOOM levels of societal disruption, I can think of a few ways that this plays out.
Left-wing communist populist marxist social democratic total victory: public outcry reaches all-time highs, perhaps with some peasant revolts sprinkled in, and the AOC/Mamdani coalition gets voted in to dismantle the AI labs, big tech and the icky billionaires. Leaving aside the fact that this would annihlate the economy and living standards by proxy, I'm not really convinced that with mass internet and social media there's any gini index or amount of redistribution that would leave the status anxious public satisfied. First they came for the billionaires and then they came for the homeowners.... Certainly comparable democratic countries with half of the gini index of America are still constantly flooded with rhetoric about eating the rich.
Right-wing AI strongman technofeudal democratic backsliding: political violence becomes normalised as a part of day to day life and as a response, perhaps after a significant assassination or riot, a strongman or group of technocrats use the violence as an excuse to seize absolute power, abetted by AI in part or in full. The lumpenproles are kept under control via mass surveillance, drones and guns or killed off entirely. The worst ending, but one that seems depressingly realistic looking at the history of inequality and failed revolutions.
Nothing ever happens: whether mass unemployment happens or not, most people end up with sinecures or welfare to keep them relatively pacified. Social media and concentrating wealth inequality continues to make people miserable even as absolute material conditions begin to reach sci-fi levels, and competition for zero-sum goods like housing in desirable areas and prestigious educations and sinecures becomes even more red in tooth and claw in the vein of the East Asian countries. Political violence gets somewhat more normalised, perhaps to Latin American or 20th century standards, but it's limited to isolated incidents.
Generally I consider myself libertarian and think that billionaires are good, actually, but I do think that inequality and society's response to inequality is likely to be one of the defining questions of the 21st century. While Sam Altman is the most visible face of AI to normies, pure game theory dictates that technological progress will continue with or without the consent of any individual person, company or nation-state, if the capability exists someone (or something...) is going to be the one that holds those reins to wealth, status and power, and as long those reins are held then the holder will inevitably be the target of the green-eyed masses. I don't think we yet have the social technology to deal with this and it's not clear that we ever will; I've seriously been thinking lately whether this might be one way that the Fermi Paradox manifests.
What about the AI bubble pops? The cost decreases and capability increases simply never materialize and we enter into a recession or a depression.
More options
Context Copy link
A scenario you didn't mention: AI takes over and rules alongside Moloch over everyone.
I think this is much more likely than technofeudalism: because people are too incompetent, and what would someone who desires to dominate everyone desire after?
It doesn't have to be ASI. Climate change alone may do it, by coercing everyone to cooperate more to maintain normal.
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree. Happiness is greatly tied to absolute material prosperity but relative prosperity gates access to some goods that are essential for happiness, like housing and a mate.
Furthermore, inequality is a proxy for an uneven distribution of power. Have that imbalance become severe enough and it becomes a mortal threat, especially as it relates to automation.
The level of worry that is rational here greatly depends on automation timelines but ignoring inequality is perhaps the most retarded thing anyone can do.
I suppose my view is that wealth isn't power, power is power. Any coalition capable of unseating the billionaire class would by definition hold more power than the current wealthy. I'm not sure it really makes much difference whether it's a Langley spook, Hague bureaucrat, tech billionaire, or CCP party member that holds the reins to ultimate power and status.
As long as technology exists you'll get centralization of power, but as long as centralized technological power doesn't exist you get Haiti or South Sudan, the Hobbesian life in a state of nature.
Extension du domaine de la lutte. The progressive ideal of re-distributing wealth is at least logically possible, but it's fundamentally impossible to re-distribute everyone a big house in the best locations and a high status mate. If being better than others is essential to happiness, then perhaps that is humanity's punishment for eating the forbidden fruit.
There is a vast gulf between "viable access to family formation" and "elite mansion with access to the most desirable partner". It isn't really arguable that modern society is failing to provide the former to a far larger portion of the population than it did in the past. The fact that "absolute living standards" means that we now have far more convenient and easy to use sports betting applications and larger flatscreen TVs doesn't really address the serious material concerns that a lot of people are facing.
At the same time, a lot of the visible concentrations of wealth in modern society are nakedly and undeniably antisocial. Take a look at some of President Trump's recent pardons - several of them have gone to people who defrauded the government or the greater populace. When people get angry at Joseph Schwartz, they're not envious that he's so much richer and better than him - they're furious that he cut costs in a way that lead to the death of their relatives while simultaneously avoiding paying tax. His wealth was explicitly gained in a way that harmed the rest of society, and yet our current system ensured he largely escaped consequences while the people who sued him and won in court received no compensation. While that's just one of the more prominent examples from recent news, you don't have to look particularly hard to find all sorts of examples of people profiting by dumping negative externalities on the public.
I agree, but this doesn't really have anything to do with inequality. Most of South America and Africa have vastly higher Gini indexes and much more blatant, corrupt wealth inequality than any developed country yet retain much higher TFR's, while the social democratic Nordic countries living under the law of Jante have amongst the lowest TFR's worldwide. Being rich, free & educated, having the optionality in life to do anything in life at the expense of having children, social atomization and access to smartphones seem like much more causal factors to plummeting rates of family formation.
I agree that a lot of the aesthetics of the modern wealthy are off-putting, but as I mentioned earlier, "powerful people act in upsetting ways" is not a solvable problem as long as the fundamental ability to concentrate power through technology exists at all. Nobody remembers the man that Luigi killed and nothing changed whatsoever. If it's not the current crop of people seizing the reins of power to enrich themselves, it'll simply be someone else stepping up in their stead.
My opinion is that the increased immigration flows and financial pressure on housing and cost of living have much more to do with the collapse in fertility rates than being free and educated. That said, the topic is so complicated that it could be a thread by itself - so I'll just say that I think the increase in relative costs of living is a direct result of policies solely pursued due to that inequality and that is what is decreasing fertility.
First of all, this is not just "the aesthetics" of the modern wealthy. What Schwartz did directly harmed society in exchange for personally enriching him, and this isn't some isolated case. Look through the list of pardons that Trump has handed out and you can see countless cases of this kind of banal and venal corruption. On top of that, look at people like Rick Scott, who defrauded the government and then used his ill-gotten wealth to get elected. There's no law of the universe which says that people need to put up with this odious nonsense, and this flagrant looting of the nation is prime tinder for a nasty political blowback. What kind of vision of the future are you offering when you say that things are going to be terrible forever and rich criminals will never face justice?
Moreover, the idea that this isn't a solvable problem is just completely false. Hell, all of those pardons could be fixed by the simple expedient of not allowing the president to pardon people in exchange for personal financial gain. It doesn't have to be like this and there are numerous governments throughout history and the world that have prevented this kind of behavior and stopped it.
Actually, the recent wave of warehouse burnings was directly inspired by his shooting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The root of this is not entirely unjustified, although I won't contend envy is not some part of it.
Before the industrial revolution, power and population were strongly correlated: if you want to be powerful, you need people on your side, and a lot of them. Even if "on your side" means a not-particularly-reciprocated relationship of "I sit here in my castle and you plow the fields", at least the peasant is necessary to plow the fields. You can't just kill him (or at least, not all of him), or the field goes unplowed, and you starve.
With the advent of industrial and especially computer technology, this balance is upset. You really can just kill all the peasants and have the field plow itself. Now, is this done? No, or at least, not yet. But it's partly because it's not yet entirely practical. You can buy a really nice nuclear bunker for a few billion in 2026, but nonetheless, post-kaboom, it's still just a relic of a prior era and you're on a limited, non-renewable supply of luxuries with minimal ability to bootstrap yourself and your buddies back up to industrial civilisation on timescales relevant to your personal comfort. Thus, it's more comfortable for now to not kill everybody.
But that's just a technology problem, too. In the foreseeable future, it may indeed be feasible to build a full, self-sustaining, closed loop of industrial production (ie, sufficiently advanced bots that they are capable of maintaining the infrastructure of their own production, together with being able to do agriculture for you). Once you have this, yeah, you really can just exterminate billions of plebes and suffer no long-term decline in quality of life.
So, basically, industrial production still depends on the labour of large numberse of plebeians--too many to keep alive with you in a bunker, so they must be kept alive for now.
The plebeians, daft may they be at times, are not entirely unaware of the dynamics at play here. Everybody has seen Kingsman, they know how this works. "Automate everything" is brought in under the guise of "but it will make everyone comfy and bring in an Age of Abundance!", with a Thatcher-esque dismissal of "but who controls all these bots?" as unjustified envy of the rich. But the reality is once the plebes are not necessary, the people in control of the bot swarm sooner or later will decide maybe keeping this unproductive Disney World alive isn't actually worth the trouble, and just decide to pull the plug.
So where does this leave us? Well, the Butlerian Jihad, obviously (fun fact: the "Butler" in "Butlerian Jihad" is this guy, who wrote this cute little letter, which you should read at your leisure).
I'm not saying this kind of scenario is impossible, but consider that there are large groups of people in the United States who are already candidates for the genocide you are proposing. And kind of the opposite is happening.
So I think the scenario you propose is unlikely. It's true that people want power, material abundance, etc. But people also crave social status. And you get a lot of social status out of making a show of benevolence to these unnecessary plebes as you term them.
I think it’s actually very likely. There aren’t any examples of people building “Disneyland” for people unrelated to them, particularly people who do nothing to benefit those paying for it. Keep in mind that this scenario would entail the majority of the population, and those with the money to pay for it also have the power to murder the population in Disneyland who are a drain with no benefit. They are essentially pets. But no one will spend billions on the pets. Elon Musk isn’t the insane cat lady who’s going to keep 500 bums in his mansion.
I strongly disagree. There is a huge system in place to distribute jobs, money, social status, and so on to so-called "historically underrepresented groups."
More options
Context Copy link
You are aware of the sums being spent on the homeless in West Coast cities, right?
Is that why they all sleep in the overpasses?
I'm not sure what the contradiction is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's a political ideology that's good at rallying moralistic middle-aged women, teachers, doctors, officials, NGOdom... They do the caring for the homeless.
But is that ideology strong with tech billionaires or high-ranking military/intelligence spooks? Billionaires and spooks are the ones to worry about with AI takeover, they have their hands on the buttons.
An economic system that produces and requires a bunch of middle-aged women in office jobs, a bunch of teachers and bureaucrats and officials and journalists, that seems to produce leftism we recognize today, just like a system that requires a bunch of professional heavy cavalry leans towards martial valour and manly vigour...
But take away that economic system and replace it with robots, we'd see something quite different surely?
I'm informed that they already have their hands on the buttons. Certainly the middle aged women are not the ones with their fingers on the buttons.
In what sense are they required?
Well the system we have has this kind of 'harmony' in that it evolves to meet the needs of the economy and the economy evolves to meet the needs of the system. Managerial state, managerial culture, niceness and rule-abiding, cancellation of dissidents because some middle-aged woman decided you shouldn't have a bank account or legal representation or whatever. And the economy gets altered by the system, so we get lots of pensions and healthcare spending and no nuclear energy. There sure are a lot of tensions and conflicts going on, 'contradictions' in Marxist terms, but the basic system remains intact.
My point is that rugpulling the economic base will rugpull the ideology too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Relative deprivation/hedonic treadmill.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, it's kinda depressing to realize that some of the most optimistic scenarios for AI will still result in a lot of human misery. It's fun to be a trust fund baby, but if all the hoi polloi are trust fund babies too, it kinda loses its shine. You are just another unemployed loser who can't get a reservation at any of the best restaurants. And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the grandchild of some schmuck who was lucky enough to put $10,000 into the right stock at the right time.
There is a story they used to teach in American history classes in high school that many of the early immigrants to the United States were people who had been locked out of European status hierarchies and decided to make a fresh start of things. Perhaps a similar sentiment will drive migration to the stars.
Even if we assume there isn’t still some guy getting paid to crawl into the server farms and cooling towers and fix stuff, you don’t need to be a personal servant. Waiting tables isn’t demeaning- and these people will eat at restaurants, waiters are already a luxury good, that job’s not going away.
You'd be amazed at the shit customers pull these days. I don't wait tables anymore, but in the time I did, I had customers:
Bartending wasn't much better.
My partner still works in the industry and it seems like not much has changed.
I have a modest proposal that service workers shouldn't have to deal with that.
For example, maybe if a customer is rude, the business can forcibly fine them. A customer can challenge the fine + court fees, and is presumed innocent, but since it's a private establishment the business can present video evidence.
Thus, business owners are incentivized to let employees refuse to serve rude customers, rather than the other way around (importantly, the customer can't be fined after a sale).
It's a small thing, along with letting factory workers wear headphones.
I believe this one's actually OSHA banning it, not the factories.
More options
Context Copy link
Even without the modest proposal part, ask yourself "exactly how could a business (particularly a small business) abuse this against customers, if the business owner was petty enough to want to do that?" (And plenty of business owners are petty. That's one of the advantages a big box store like Walmart has over mom and pop stores.)
If your proposal is vulnerable to such abuses, it's a bad idea.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who worked in retail years and years ago, hollow laughter.
Managers won't take the side of staff because customers bring in money while staff cost money. And nowadays, with your business living and dying by online reviews, and anything less than 5 stars being seen as terrible, there's even more of a perverse incentive to appease even the loudest mouth, because that's precisely the person who will leave 1 star reviews everywhere and get up an online campaign to boycott your business. Throwing staff to the wolves is easier than telling bad customers to buzz off.
Used to be the right of refusal of service, but that got neutered after all the lawsuits about equal treatment etc. (just think of the gay wedding cakes argument for one). You can technically refuse service so long as the reasons are non-discrimination, but today everything can be turned into "that's discrimination!" (e.g. Kamala and Hillary didn't get elected because sexism and racism, in Kamala's case, not because nobody wanted them as president).
Some places will protect staff, but generally customer facing is low ranking, high turnover anyway, and you're disposable.
To illustrate the point from my own retail experiences from years and years ago: We had to do customer service training every year. I worked the service desk a lot, and my first year there I was always baffled by the manager's willingness to give refunds for stupid shit. For example, it was a grocery store, and we sold deli pizzas that you took home and made yourself. Someone tried to return one that 1. Was already cooked and 2. Had two pieces left. The couple's stated reason for the return was that it "wasn't as good as we remembered it being". I had to call the manager because I wasn't allowed to refuse refunds (this wasn't normally an issue since most refunds were pretty routine), and I was incredulous when he gave them store credit.
It wasn't until they started the customer service trainings that I realized that $3 was a small price to pay to keep from pissing these people off. They shopped there every week and weren't constantly returning items, and it would probably cost the store a lot more in the long run if they decided to go somewhere else. We had already disappointed them with the pizza, after all. Add to it the fact that stores will spend huge amounts on advertising without even thinking about it and then try to nickle and dime the customers as soon as they get into the store. I was told that we needed to provide an absolutely flawless experience to the extent possible. If someone asked where an item was we weren't allowed to tell them; we had to walk them to the location. The thing is, it's not like it was that great of a store or anything. Good service is just a customer expectation, and if you can't provide it, and can't make up for it in other ways (like having rock bottom prices), people will take their business elsewhere.
I think providing good service is reasonable, as long as the customer is polite and not asking for something particularly demanding.
The refund wasn’t your problem, the manager is the one who’s losing from giving customers extra.
My focus is when customers are disrespectful, or the boss is disrespectful, or otherwise causing the employee unnecessarily difficulty.
I think that pettiness is particularly evil, because it’s clearly unjust, loss without gain. Whereas even a robber baron, while unjust, at least gains the money others lose, and can donate it back to society. I wonder why society doesn’t focus on tackling pettiness more than other issues.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That’s why they were proposing a legal framework where it becomes profitable for the restaurant to go after rude customers. If the restaurant gets most of the fine and there is an additional even more punitive fine for reviewing a restaurant after you’ve been found against (and running an anon review service is banned), you could reset the incentives. I would be mostly fine with all of this except for the banning of anon review sites because I don’t like the idea of ID gating the internet, even a small part of it.
I don’t want ID to be part of the internet either.
Anon review sites are already untrustworthy. Ideally, people revert to paid trustworthy critics or form paid webs of trust, so rando nitpicking and shill glazing are both ignored.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You go be a waiter for your whole life then.
It all depends on how people treat service workers, and increasingly it seems to be entitlement and treating them like servants/trash. "I'm paying for this so I deserve to be treated with the bowing and scraping you'd give a duke" is the attitude.
Even years back, when I worked in a shop, I still remember the guy who was buying a newspaper and who didn't even bother to look at me as he paid, he kept his head turned chatting to his friend and literally threw the money down on the counter. That was just bad manners, but clearly in his mind, I wasn't even a person to be acknowledged.
Now add in drunks and lunatics, and I'd crawl over broken glass rather than work public-facing jobs again in service/retail industries.
Daily I am reminded of how I am fortunate to live in Japan. There are of course drunks and lunatics here as well, and entitled pricks are not difficult to find, but generally service is superior and customers are gracious. Even--maybe even most noticeably because they're just workaday usual-- in regular retail jobs.
edit: Japan is fucked in many ways.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We have robot waiters now.
And they are a marginal presence because people prefer humans to clankers.
Funny enough, I've had the insight that the one thing you can do to increase your odds of success in the post-AI world is be pleasant and enjoyable to physically be around. Whatever that means for you. If other humans WANT to spend time with you and be in your presence, you can parlay that into success in whatever the situation becomes. Attractive women have a clear advantage.
As an introvert, the robot waiters work exceedingly well for me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For a lot of people it is, especially if there is a kind of permanent aristocracy in place. Personally, I don't think I'd mind being a waiter or a bartender, but I've already had a lengthy career as a well compensated professional. For someone who just graduated law school or business school or whatever, well, that might be a different story.
Yep.
The implied lack of upward mobility is probably the part that would make it unbearable.
You're a waiter because that's the only role you are capable of serving in this world. You cannot ever expect to get recognized for more than that. Not even luck will save you.
The patrons who use your services may even treat you with basic dignity, but yeah, your status will never approach theirs, and you both know it.
Yeah, I'm not sure it would be unbearable, but it still seems pretty lousy. I'm not an expert on European history, but I am pretty sure there were situations like that in medieval Europe. Where a person worked the fields as a serf, not because of any innate abilities or lack thereof, but rather because his father had been a serf; his father's father had been a serf; and so on. Meanwhile, he served some kind of feudal lord. Who was a feudal lord because his father was one. And so on back to some day in the distant past.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At some point, a Matrix style world where everyone is just dumped in a virtual reality simulator where they can each become a hero of their own tale switched from one of the most dystopian outcomes imaginable to one of the better ones.
The realization hit me this weekend as I was hanging out with some friends at an artificial lagoon with temperature controlled water, lifeguards on duty, and basically everything optimized for keeping guests from getting hurt (and keep them spending money).
This is precisely how a 'beneficent' superintelligence is most likely to resolve the problem. Stick humans into a simulation, or maybe a completely artificial environment with all the edges that cause death and misery sanded off.
A permanent Disney World vacation. Maybe swap out the aesthetics often enough to make it feel novel.
Call me John the Savage but I always thought The Culture was a human zoo dystopia.
Life without struggle seems positively meaningless.
You can have your meaningful struggle life. I'm very down for the culture, I'll gonna enjoy lava rafting, a brain that can synthesize its own drugs, and fucking my ultra hot girlfriend with my massive gene edited dick.
If I get bored I'll move to a fun sounding meme planet and become a bat-person or whatever. I bet I could have a few hundred years of fun in the Culture.
More options
Context Copy link
This is why The Culture always sounded incredibly uninteresting; maybe as one book exploring an interesting dystopia, sure, but a whole series about how awesome it is? Uh...
I haven't read it though. It sounds boring and dumb. Utopia is stupid setting.
I recently read Player of Games and while to some degree I echo the "boring Utopia" criticism, a lot of what makes the Culture utopia is a literally incredible amount of technological wizardly.
I can buy warp drives and the like, but if you have robots with little force fields and humans that can take a retrovirus to change gender and do drugs by thinking about it, you arguably have moved past the point of being able to offer social commentary simply because your society is inhuman. Banks, it seems to me, does social commentary anyway and I wouldn't say it's entirely a miss - some of it is thought-provoking. But I sort of choke when I am expected to believe that humans were doing stuff like going to dinner parties instead of wireheading or something even thought the technology in the books is more than just "really really smart AI," it is the ability to manipulate the spacetime continuum to a degree that arguably surpassed Star Trek (while having just enough limitations to serve the purposes of this specific plot, much like, well, an old-fashioned Star Trek episode).
Not sure if I explained that well. But basically Banks is, from what I can tell, asking me to believe that the entire Culture has insane gigatech and lives in the way that it does (that way happening to be, basically, what a liberal arts student would hope a socialist utopia would be like) Just Because. I've been vastly preferring the Stephenson I've read recently; Stephenson really is interested in the intersection of technology and ideology and tries to show his work whereas the Culture, to be honest, seems if anything more naive than Star Trek about the ideology of the future (while sharing perhaps certain assumptions of Roddenberry about how The Future would eliminate certain barriers between older men and young and desirable women.) Obviously you can justify anything you want in the Culture by waving your hands and saying "aligned AI" but that doesn't necessarily make it satisfying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That is 5000% my own objection to the Culture as portrayed.
The ONLY entities with true volition in that universe are the minds. No human ever makes a meaningful choice, and whatever influence they have on their own fate is inherently pre-calculated in by the minds.
And somehow the humans are 100% aware of the arrangement and there are few dissenters, although they can get uppity from time to time.
It honestly makes me sympathetic to Culture opponents just on the basis of "yes, maybe they're sadistic, evil, and backwards, but at least they're the masters of their own fate dammit!"
I think that's the precise objection leveled by the main character of the first book, actually.
It seems to me that the Culture deals with this by letting the dissenters interact with other cultures/societies on their behalf as part of Contact. Also humans live extended lifespans but not immortality, so far as Wikipedia tells me, so the problem will eventually solve itself; even the most fiery rebel can't maintain that meaningfully within the Culture, and if they leave to join a different world, then they are no longer a problem:
Yeah, and that's the existential horror of the situation to me.
You can dissent from the Culture, you can rebel, you can even try to kill yourself.
But none of that will change the outcome.
Its still there. Everywhere. Inevitable. And all alternatives are inherently worse.
I have before said that the inverse of the Culture might be a civilization of pure P-zombies whose whole, entire goal is removing sentience from the universe. Not intelligence, just sentience.
Assuming they're technologically equivalent to the culture, would the Culture win that fight?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If we're presuming a benevolent superintelligence, I don't see why simulations couldn't provide exactly the right amount and type of struggle to each individual to provide just the right amount of meaning in their lives such that, at each moment, they genuinely feel like they're leading the most meaningful life they could be living. For all you or I know, we're currently in an alpha version of that simulation right now. Surely such a superintelligence would be familiar with Brave New World and other dystopian fiction and criticisms about them and at least try to route around the pitfalls.
Yeah, a similar thought had occurred to me. I think it's a good response to the "too boring" or "too easy" argument.
More options
Context Copy link
Or... the final version.
I actually had that thought as I was pondering this, along the lines of "oh shit what if the singularity happened in 2025 and the superintelligence is just A/B testing or Beta testing the environment to find the ideal amount of suffering, adventure, surprise, intrigue, and danger for human 'thriving.'
Its trying out things like the Moon mission and prediction markets/gambling and weight loss drugs and seeing how we react. Its moving oil prices around, its delaying GTA 6, its generating ridiculous amounts of AI "slop" to see which ones click with us.
(Oh wait, I just invented the plot of The Amazing Digital Circus from first principles)
More options
Context Copy link
I don't see how that would be so dystopian, either. "God wouldn't make your burden heavier than what you can carry" is absolutely lindy. Why not make it truth for once?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is why we should have a real meritocracy instead of a luckocracy. My only problem with Sam Altman is that he isn't enough of a genius. His product is good and better people ought to have more money than the rabble.
AI will be more meritorious than any human, though.
I'm pro sentient sillicon super intelligence. I just want to make sure it has qualia and isn't a Chinese room.
"In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children." - Nick Bostrom
I'd also add some preferences regarding population and personality and such, but "do our successors have any intrinsic value or not" does seem to be the first and most important criterion to have!
However, I'm confused by the use of the phrase "make sure" here. Unless you're expecting to be uploaded, and you're confident that the idea of a "p-zombie" is incoherent (which I'm guessing you aren't, given the Chinese room reference), what observations could give you any sense of surety here? Today's LLMs can pass Turing tests, which used to be our "fine, they're sentient now" criterion, but their lack of "medium-term" memory and they fact that they still can "slip" in ways that make them seem non-sentient makes us think in hindsight that our criterion was just inadequate, and yet we haven't really found anything to replace it. If tomorrow's LLMs never slip, does that mean they've become sentient, or does that just mean they've become better at faking it?
If it can be a true successor, with intelligence, agency, and everything, it's probably sentient. If we can't figure out what sentience is in the mean time, maybe we don't deserve to keep existing into the future anyway. It's probably not that hard, but humans are very disappointing currently.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well in your meritocracy, would people be able to bequeath resources to their descendants?
Yes, because I value latent merit.
Ok, so let me amend my scenario a bit:
And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the wastrel great grandchild of some admittedly brilliant software engineer whose indolent son had a fling with a stripper.
Yes, but he doesn't have the latent merit, and we can measure that. So the scenario would only be
But so what? It's pretty normal for people to bequeath wealth to their wastrel descendants.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link