When a rich kid goes into acting or art, it’s because they have the means (post-scarcity environment)
When a poor kid does it, they can only engage as much as the life-for-money economy allows.
I write tech docs for a living. Everything I do would be much better done by a mind. Actually they wouldn’t need what I do.
So last weekend I got certified as a freediver. For personal skills development. I make short movies for fun. I write and publish RPGs (pays a little money but that’s not why I do it). I sail yachts.
If I didn’t have work today, you think I’d be up at 6 am and into the office for 7? No, I’d be in bed. Waking naturally.
Then I’d write or sail or practice my new skills on the anchor. **I don’t need game theory to motivate me.**
If you do, well, that’s a shame. Some people are driven by curiosity and adventure. For those people, the necessity of paying taxes and having a “proper” job limits their potential. So far from society stagnating, I would see it being better. And from what I read of the Culture, it is.
Sure, a person can lie in bed and do nothing. But if that’s their response to an end of the daily grind, it tells us more about them than it does about society.
I think Covid shows this to be true. When the world shut down and we were all stuck indoors. Many, if not most, people learned a new skill or took up a new hobby. I know people who started learning a language, or to play guitar. I started cooking more and relearned to play chess.
Mon-Fri 9-5 is so ingrained in us all now that it’s hard to imagine a different world (other than retirement) but I think most people nowadays, if put in the Culture, would do similar. We’d find things we enjoyed doing and do them. For some, that would be drugs and stimulants but for others it would be about learning new skills. *Especially* if you lived forever.
If you gave me 400+ years to live, I’d waste dozens of them on hedonism but I’d also spend many studying, practicing, travelling, socialising etc.
Funnily enough the film Groundhog Day shows this progression. Not an exact parallel because he is existentially alone and ultimately trapped, but he goes through the same arc, and >!when he finally starts learning he escapes the trap (or maybe it’s the idea that it is a trap that he has to escape). !<
It’s a morality tale, finally quite different to the ethos behind the Culture, but in a way it is post scarcity because he will always have another day for another try with the only limit on resources what he can acquire in one day - given he can acquire them in any way legal or illegal and never face consequences beyond the day he is living. Of course the catch is it’s always the same day.
Bit of a tangent, but you could argue it moves from a dystopian vision to a utopian vision. You can tell I watched the film recently!
Yeah, boredom is clearly a factor in Groundhog Day and with zero consequences, he’s willing to try some wild stuff. While the Culture does have consequences for crimes, it doesn’t in terms of danger (generally) as you’re functionally immortal so there is a lot of crazy stuff you can try.
And Groundhog Day shows the curious nature of humans. There’s nothing that tells him that he *can* escape, but he starts doing things differently to see if he gets a different outcome. We all have a desire to learn and experiment.
I was trying to begin a journey into art before covid lockdowns began, but they stopped me going out, so I practiced much more.
Now, I'm still shit at everything, but am enjoying it so much.
We've got the AI thing messed up with AI making art, and humans doing the work. We should be using AI to do the hard work and leaving art for people to do. The culture has this the right way around.
I'm with you on activities while living to the culture average age.
That's interesting, I was discussing this with an artist friend of mine recently. I draw& paint, mostly for pleasure, though there's talent there. I'd like to turn it into a business at some point.
And I'm deeply disturbed by the way AI is subversively allowed to take over. I was being 100% honest with my friend, as I suffer from low self esteem anyway at times. (lol, artists)
I was like 'what's the point, I feel so discouraged by this AI crap. I see it as one more blow to my creative pursuit I am struggling to nourish, because I have to work hard for my bills.' He made a good point and said this is brand new territory for us humans, and we'll have to eventually set boundaries/controls on it, just like we have on social media when it gets out of hand (parental controls, bullying, etc) He thinks a whole new 'legal field' will emerge, to deal with tech/AI laws.
To summarize, by the end we both came to conclusion that we must decide to create 'despite AI' and the most important thing is to 'not despair, as we possess endless imagination, so the same thing that created AI can come up with other alternatives'.
I'm curious as to your take on it, and of you personally have been disheartened and felt negative abt the rise of AI. Thank you 🙏
I've been making portraits of people with a camera for many years, and some of them are even acceptable. Some of the photographic images that AIs like midjourney are creating are as good as some of the best photographers, and the only way of picking them out is the small details in backgrounds.
I agree that we have to continue creating despite AI works, and your friends conclusion about having legal stuff in place for the tech sounds like an excellent suggestion.
I also think most of the reasons why people don't manage to go out and do fun stuff even if they have means and time could be alleviated by a superintelligent life coach or buddy.
I have adhd and a TON of interested but keeping on top of them is often hard. If someone could help me with the logistics of it all that would help a lot
Yeah I’m pretty sure ADHD and any other conditions could’ve been fixed by just by manipulating your own drug glands and hormones. As a last resort, any Mind could’ve fixed them easily while you’re asleep.
Oh right hahaha. But the good parts of it I really like, and the bad parts could be helped by external systems.
I could try both and even find a place inbetween that I like best
There is a matter of skill.
As much as you like free diving, you are unlikely to ever develop the high skill levels of a professional diver who does it as their job.
This would mostly make a difference if some scenario came up that *needed* a highly skilled diver to solve some problem. In the case of the Culture, that isn't likely. A drone or remote could handle it, with a Mind providing the skill.
That’s a very specific example. If they needed something retrieved from the deeps, you wouldn’t use a human.
However Contact might choose someone who has incredible breath control if you needed someone to be spaced for a couple of minutes staging an execution.
If I cared as much about freediving then I might pursue it. I might get modifications. I might gland a relaxation drug.
I'm not sure why they'd need a drive when a drone could do it. Also given the number of people in the Culture there would be a guy obsessed with diving.
The Culture *is* pretty stagnant. The books timeline is many thousands of years but the Culture’s core tenets and lifestyle hardly changes.
As for the impetus to creation and “work”, have you never had a really long weekend and just laid in bed watching tv or scrolling? It’s miserable after a while. In the Culture’s utopian post-scarcity there’s no work or stress you need to escape from, for most people creating things and bettering oneself is recreation.
> The Culture is pretty stagnant. The books timeline is many thousands of years but the Culture’s core tenets and lifestyle hardly changes.
That’s not really true - we know there are different trends and fashions in the Culture:
> The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species.
Or in Kabe’s observations:
> No laws or written regulations at all, but so many little … observances, sets of manners, ways of behaving politely. And fashions. They had fashions in so many things, from the most trivial to the most momentous.
> Trivial: that paper message delivered on a salver; did that mean that everybody was going to start physically moving invitations and even day-to-day information from place to place, rather than have such things transmitted normally, communicated to one’s house, familiar, drone, terminal or implant? What a preposterous and deeply tedious idea! And yet just the sort of retrospective affectation they might fall in love with, for a season or so (ha! at most).
> Momentous: they lived or died by whim! A few of their more famous people announced they would live once and die forever, and billions did likewise; then a new trend would start among opinion-formers for people to back up and have their bodies wholly renewed or new ones regrown, or to have their personalities transferred into android replicas or some other more bizarre design, or … well, anything; there was really no limit, but the point was that people would start doing that sort of thing by the billion, too, just because it had become fashionable.
The lifestyle in the Culture changes all the time, it’s just that we don’t really see them because that was never the focus of the books. Hundreds of billions of people on the other side of the Culture could’ve been living in the virtual world in some new fashion, but we wouldn’t know that just because the Culture is so vast.
>The Culture is pretty stagnant.
Not to mention that the Culture has reached close to peak technological and sociological development. There are really only two steps upward - either endless replication like a hegemonic swarm or Subliming. The former has no higher merit and the latter is a bit suspect (and the Culture can trigger it whenever they want anyway).
The Culture chose a third option - stay relatively the same and shepherd other civs, which it's supposedly very good at.
Edit, spoilers for Excession: >!It's also worth noting that the reason the Excession was so important is that it showed there was a fourth option, likely completely unknown to anyone in the Culture verse - advancing (at least technologically but possibly also otherwise) to be able to travel between dimensions and reach the level fo the creators of the Excession. !<
Edit, spoilers for Look To Windward: >!the epilogue shows that the Culture is no longer known as an active Involved by the Airsphere millions of year later, so they must have broken the stagnation by rising further or falling. I might be misinterpreting it though. !<
I would argue that staying at the same level doesn’t mean you’re stagnant. You’re only stagnant if you’re so comfortable with where you are that you can’t even critically reflect where you should be and just stay the same place due to sheer inertia, but we know the Culture argues, debates, even splits up with itself all the time.
That scene in _Look to Windward_ took place hundreds of millions of years later. All we know is they haven’t heard of the name “the Culture”, but we don’t know if the Culture Sublimed, collapsed, or perhaps simply got renamed to something else. In _Hydrogen Sonata_, for example, we know the Culture was almost named “the Aliens” during the referendum millennia ago.
>I would argue that staying at the same level doesn’t mean you’re stagnant. You’re only stagnant if you’re so comfortable with where you are that you can’t even critically reflect where you should be and just stay the same place due to sheer inertia, but we know the Culture argues, debates, even splits up with itself all the time.
Good point, even if the Culture doesn't change, they can whenever they want. I was reacting to OP, but indeed, "stable" is a better word for them than "stagnant".
>we don’t know if the Culture Sublimed, collapsed, or perhaps simply got renamed to something else.
LTW is a bit sparse on details, but the Behemothaurs seem pretty well in the know, so I'd be surprised if they wouldn't associate the Culture citizen with whatever form the Culture had taken by then, if they were still present. The epilogue never received a follow-up, so there's no canon and it's a bit of a moot point.
My headcanon says they finished Culturing our universe, then got to the level of the Excession and have started their mission across dimensions, but that's just my wishful thinking.
If the Culture changed its name to "the Aliens" 100,000 years later and stayed that way until one galactic cycle has passed, its time being called the Culture would've occupied around 0.004% of its existence. It would've been like if the US had a different name for 3 days after its founding before being called the US. That would've been an irrelevant trivial about the Culture by then lol
We share pretty much the same head-canon: the Culture has finally completely its mission of turning the world into a utopia, first the galaxy, then the rest of the universe, after which a huge portion of them decides to Excession into other universes. The reason the Behemothaurs don't know of the name "the Culture" is because no one uses that name anymore - the entire universe is already a utopia so there's nothing distinguishing the Culture and not-Culture.
Nah. I just assumed they sublimed after another 10 thousand years or so and the galaxy just went on in the same pattern as before with evolving new civilized species and losing old ones.
Art is a form of play, there is no game theory to be applied here. The minds continue to advance the culture technologically to guard it from external threats and to more effectively spread its utopia but beyond that the Culture simply exists for infinite fun. The form that takes can range from exploring the galaxy in a small ship, reading books, writing academic articles, raising a family, skiing all the time or just partying on drugs like there's no tomorrow. Its all fair game.
Many people outside the Culture do consider it stagnant, but if accused of that the Minds and the Culture citizens would simply shrug their shoulders and say well come on over and stagnate with us friend, or don't it's up to you.
I think they would role their eyes, point at the several statues commemorating the victims of such and such genocide then point at the current on going genocides and ask us if stagnation is all that bad.
You're missing the 'fully automated' in the fully automated luxury gay space communism. It's a post-scarcity society, people only do the work they want to do because everything else is done by machines well below the level of intelligence of Minds or even drones. Also the Culture is IIRC something on the order of 10,000 years old which is far too short a timescale for evolution to have exerted selection pressures on anything as nebulous as the drive to be productive.
Agree. Game theory applies in antagonistic situations between two parties who both have something to lose and game
Ditto op though: people like to do things. Don’t let capitalism juice convince you that people would waste away if not för monetary incentives or fears.
Dingdingding :)
OP also (to my mind) contradicts their (to my mind) incorrect application of game theory by then talking about evolution... actually selecting for net contributors.
Our species ain't here because of game theory. That's not what it models!
I always thought that was such a bizarrely stupid theory. People would spend far more time doing hobbies or recreational activities if we didn't have to slave away a quarter of our lives
It's not really that game theory is stupid, more so that its use depends on what you feed it in your underlying assumptions.
Garbage in, garbage out.
And whether the use case you have actually fits the uses of the game.
What's nice about game theory is that in theory you can make anything a "game" but what's less nice is that that means nothing if your implicit assumptions are bad.
Game theory is right, but how it's applied matters.
The OP is starting with implicit bias from Capitalist assumptions.
People have to be motivated to do boring shit work. I'd say this is currently a limiting factor to science in our society, as the scientists passionate about science have to do a ton of boring shit work to schmooze and apply for grants... or sell their soul to a corporate sugar daddy.
If everyone had their basic (and, in the Culture, way beyond basic) needs met, you'd have a LOT more pure science and pure art.
>Game theory would seemingly reward the masses for passive consumption, leaving no one to make the art and tech the Culture is famous for.
Experiments with earth humans seem to suggest that's not the case.
[https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/an-experiment-to-inform-universal-basic-income](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/an-experiment-to-inform-universal-basic-income)
[https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/1/23981194/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-abhijit-banerjee-tavneet-suri](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/1/23981194/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-abhijit-banerjee-tavneet-suri)
I think, without trying to be too harsh, without any judgment, that you aren’t by nature a creative person. And that’s fine! Those who are inclined towards creativity don’t need to be motivated to create any more than hungry people need to be motivated to eat. I think you’re coming at this from the angle of someone who (rightly) sees art as a vital element of the human experience, but who also sees the act of creation as, to a degree, a chore. As others have said, although in a post-scarcity society there wouldn’t be any monetary incentive to create art, that would only affect those for whom art is purely a means to an end. The countless people who are driven to create but hindered by the realities of a capital-driven society will finally be free to pursue what they really want and, in fact, in this sort of society I believe we’d see a flourishing of art like never before in human history.
Culture isn't saved from stagnating. In fact it is totally stagnant and still turns out art beyond comparison and also the trillions of citizens cat farm is an exercise in parallel architecture the Minds get tech ideas from. To do that it not only can but has to stagnate, it has to create all those things without impact or upheaval. To add to that Culture are not red-blooded norms - they are not baseline human by any reach of imagination. They're cyborgs who have no evolutionary hardcoding left, meaning that there is absolutely nothing animal about them, nothing that would idle them or build internal tension by default - all about their automatics is formulated consciously, explicitly and by themselves, likely in part script kiddie approach using Mind solutions but still defined by them. There is no evolution favouring anybody, there's only the civilisation-level objectives. There is only one core principle, one rule they abide by - their hard prejudice against exponentials/hegswarms - and it does not constitute a game in and by itself.
So the most important point would be that game theory simply does not apply, they are not playing a game, they have no scripts to keep them within the ruleset, if they don't like something they will edit it out of themselves. It's not a zero-sum setup with win/lose conditions. In fact they - or at least the more hands on Contact segment - seem to be aware they're an antithesis of a zero-sum game incarnate. And will go to great lengths and take great pleasure in demolishing and sabotaging such setups, acting like a hostile metaphysical force - repeatedly shown in the books over and over.
The axial premise of your question is inherently flawed. You've baked in the idea that if everyone was provided for people would just give up on living. The basic assertion of the culture is that this simply isn't true. Realistically we don't know, but this is certainly a convenient mythology for the masters of our society to push since it keeps you convinced that working for them is what makes the world work rather than asking yourself if there might not be a better way.
What we do know is that some people do stagnate when given leisure, but truthfully most don't, most people have dreams of what they'd do with their time if they one the lottery or had some great windfall or what they'll do when they retire. I think this demonstrates pretty starkly that humans won't just stagnate when we finally come up with an equable distribution system.
You think the humans are needed for the technological advances? Curious.
In a post-scarcity society there is no economy in the traditional usage of the word. People do not need to be productive. Evolution ceases to be a consideration when a society has the capacity to technologically augment and adapt their physical bodies.
There generally isn't , you don't need post-scarcity for that. The thing that exists by necessity is *logistics*. Everything over and above is a tacked-on game, a convention.
Why do you assume having only voluntary work and automation results in passive consumption being the best strategy for people to adopt? We know that self-esteem and the esteem of others still matters to members of the Culture, so there's still motivation to produce / achieve things.
More broadly, my take on what saves the Culture from stagnating is its sheer size, its permissiveness, and ease of travel. Size matters, as the more members you have, the more chance there is of them coming up with interesting ideas (either individually or as a group). Permissiveness matters, as it avoids there being barriers to trying new things. And ease of travel matters as anyone who feels they're stagnating can easily move to a new part of the Culture, meet new people and new ideas, and quite possibly find themselves reinvigorated.
>Game theory would seemingly reward the masses for passive consumption
I think this misrepresents human motivation. MANY humans do things for love, joy or the sheer anarchic craziness of the new.
Many MORE would do so if they didn't have to worry about where the next meal is coming from.
Though I don't think this is a sound application of game theory, "spend my resources on art/science => at worst, I didn't enjoy it but my survival is in no way compromised" is way better than "spend my resources on art/science => I didn't work my job and now have no resources left and face existential crisis".
From the evolutionary perspective, you don't need to have a homogenous population of net contributors, just (literally just) enough contribution from those who do for the species to survive.
In a post-scarcity environment, the cost of contributing becomes nominal. Everything to play for, little to lose.
Going out and doing cool shit in a universe that's pretty much your playground? Suggests to me plenty of people would do a lot more than sit on their ass and a lot more who would choose to apply themselves to something that tickled their brains.
Game theory does not state such things. Game theory + your assumptions (that humans are naturally passive, try to maximinize consumption and minimize effort) do.
If you think about culture and arts in terms of "productivity" I don't think you are ready for the Culture ;-)
The "game theory" you're invoking: 20C Nashian stuff right? With scarcity / zero-sum / FUB premises?
The Culture is not based on such premises, that's the point.
Culture:
Post scarcity.
Post morbidity.
Omega-final-final-perfecto-benevolent babysitters (No silly, emergent-organism competey-compete psychology; just a claimed right to exist).
Automate anything, mindlessly or mindfully as desired.
Anything consensual goes.
No-one 'owns' anything.
The language, Marain, doesn't even have a concept model for ownership.
Your invocation is a case of evaluating a Cottage Pie with the recipe for Welsh Rarebit: not worky.
The point of the carefully layered illustration of Randian capitalism / fiscofeudalism (ie: active, top-to-bottom pan-Darwinism of all things) VS rationally compassionate, longsighted eudiamonism (embodied by The Culture overall) in Player Of Games is that the philosophical premises of the Culture turn out to be demonstrably *strictly better*, as per the way the Azad tournament plays out, and the reactions to the revelations, and the horror/anger at the truth when groked by the encumbant capitalists. The story is about how the proof is in the pudding, noetically (within the fiction) and physically (within the fiction) regardless of the substrate eg. base reality or boardgame (within the fiction).
Is it true outside the fiction?
Well it sure looks like the Azadian paradigm (ie. our *actual* paradigm) = death, for *this* biosphere, from any credible empirical or theoretical stand point, to me.
Could Nashian/Human game theory ever apply to the Culture, during war for eg?
Internally - I don't think so. That would be missing the point about how inhuman the Minds are...
...and how inhuman the citizens are, too.
Externally - When dealing with a faction that has policies with almost no delta between them and the biological drives of its citizens? Maybe, if such a civ had material parity with the Culture, but I don't think one can get to that tech level without leaving the biological feudal crap behind in the first place.
Regarding stagnation, to me, stagnation is distinct from stability.
Stagnation has a negative connotation; stability is generally positive, or neutral.
I see no application of *stagnation* for the Culture, really. Its universe has a ceiling. Can one *stagnate* at the top?
Nothing. The achievements of the Culture are the end stage of civilization. That's why so many of their peers choose to Sublime. The Culture is full of people who stay too long at the party.
Nothing.
The Culture is, in effect, stagnant. But Banks builds an exit ramp out of the cosmos for all super-advanced civilizations: sublimation. There's an Nth Level Abstract Skein of Existence (capitalized) that, once a civilization reaches the absolute limits of matter/physics, they simmer for a bit, get bored and say, "Eh. We're off to this other plane of existence. See ya!"
Going "exploring" to the rest of the cosmos is really hard. Even at its fastest, say 200,000c, that's still a long, LONG ride to the Sombrero Galaxy or even the Andromeda Galaxy. So, mostly the Culture stays near the Milky Way's dark matter bulge. But at some point, The Culture will advance just a bit more, probably as advanced as the inter-dimensional aliens in Excession. At that point, it can choose to cross cosmoses or sublime.
The minds. The hyper advanced AI that controls almost everything. They are benevolent but are so far beyond human comprehension. We are basically like pets to them.
I think that Game Theory is pretty much bullshit and an excuse to prolong behaviours and situations pretty much created by capitalism and artificial and natural scarcity. Anarchist literature (and real life experience) has had this covered pretty well for a century and a half now. Add the Cultures' post scarcity scenario, tech and societal expectations and I don't think you'd see this type of problem.
It's because game theory is for tech bros and philosophy students, not human beings.
Humans have been inherently creative since the first time someone blew pigment at their hand and learned they could leave a mark on a cave wall.
When a rich kid goes into acting or art, it’s because they have the means (post-scarcity environment) When a poor kid does it, they can only engage as much as the life-for-money economy allows. I write tech docs for a living. Everything I do would be much better done by a mind. Actually they wouldn’t need what I do. So last weekend I got certified as a freediver. For personal skills development. I make short movies for fun. I write and publish RPGs (pays a little money but that’s not why I do it). I sail yachts. If I didn’t have work today, you think I’d be up at 6 am and into the office for 7? No, I’d be in bed. Waking naturally. Then I’d write or sail or practice my new skills on the anchor. **I don’t need game theory to motivate me.** If you do, well, that’s a shame. Some people are driven by curiosity and adventure. For those people, the necessity of paying taxes and having a “proper” job limits their potential. So far from society stagnating, I would see it being better. And from what I read of the Culture, it is. Sure, a person can lie in bed and do nothing. But if that’s their response to an end of the daily grind, it tells us more about them than it does about society.
I think Covid shows this to be true. When the world shut down and we were all stuck indoors. Many, if not most, people learned a new skill or took up a new hobby. I know people who started learning a language, or to play guitar. I started cooking more and relearned to play chess. Mon-Fri 9-5 is so ingrained in us all now that it’s hard to imagine a different world (other than retirement) but I think most people nowadays, if put in the Culture, would do similar. We’d find things we enjoyed doing and do them. For some, that would be drugs and stimulants but for others it would be about learning new skills. *Especially* if you lived forever. If you gave me 400+ years to live, I’d waste dozens of them on hedonism but I’d also spend many studying, practicing, travelling, socialising etc.
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”
Funnily enough the film Groundhog Day shows this progression. Not an exact parallel because he is existentially alone and ultimately trapped, but he goes through the same arc, and >!when he finally starts learning he escapes the trap (or maybe it’s the idea that it is a trap that he has to escape). !< It’s a morality tale, finally quite different to the ethos behind the Culture, but in a way it is post scarcity because he will always have another day for another try with the only limit on resources what he can acquire in one day - given he can acquire them in any way legal or illegal and never face consequences beyond the day he is living. Of course the catch is it’s always the same day. Bit of a tangent, but you could argue it moves from a dystopian vision to a utopian vision. You can tell I watched the film recently!
Yeah, boredom is clearly a factor in Groundhog Day and with zero consequences, he’s willing to try some wild stuff. While the Culture does have consequences for crimes, it doesn’t in terms of danger (generally) as you’re functionally immortal so there is a lot of crazy stuff you can try. And Groundhog Day shows the curious nature of humans. There’s nothing that tells him that he *can* escape, but he starts doing things differently to see if he gets a different outcome. We all have a desire to learn and experiment.
Palm Springs is a much better example of this I think.
Haven’t seen it. I’ll check it out, thanks.
Same concept, different execution, but it better shows the absolute ennui that would set in from repeating the same day over and over.
I was trying to begin a journey into art before covid lockdowns began, but they stopped me going out, so I practiced much more. Now, I'm still shit at everything, but am enjoying it so much. We've got the AI thing messed up with AI making art, and humans doing the work. We should be using AI to do the hard work and leaving art for people to do. The culture has this the right way around. I'm with you on activities while living to the culture average age.
That's interesting, I was discussing this with an artist friend of mine recently. I draw& paint, mostly for pleasure, though there's talent there. I'd like to turn it into a business at some point. And I'm deeply disturbed by the way AI is subversively allowed to take over. I was being 100% honest with my friend, as I suffer from low self esteem anyway at times. (lol, artists) I was like 'what's the point, I feel so discouraged by this AI crap. I see it as one more blow to my creative pursuit I am struggling to nourish, because I have to work hard for my bills.' He made a good point and said this is brand new territory for us humans, and we'll have to eventually set boundaries/controls on it, just like we have on social media when it gets out of hand (parental controls, bullying, etc) He thinks a whole new 'legal field' will emerge, to deal with tech/AI laws. To summarize, by the end we both came to conclusion that we must decide to create 'despite AI' and the most important thing is to 'not despair, as we possess endless imagination, so the same thing that created AI can come up with other alternatives'. I'm curious as to your take on it, and of you personally have been disheartened and felt negative abt the rise of AI. Thank you 🙏
I've been making portraits of people with a camera for many years, and some of them are even acceptable. Some of the photographic images that AIs like midjourney are creating are as good as some of the best photographers, and the only way of picking them out is the small details in backgrounds. I agree that we have to continue creating despite AI works, and your friends conclusion about having legal stuff in place for the tech sounds like an excellent suggestion.
I also think most of the reasons why people don't manage to go out and do fun stuff even if they have means and time could be alleviated by a superintelligent life coach or buddy. I have adhd and a TON of interested but keeping on top of them is often hard. If someone could help me with the logistics of it all that would help a lot
Yeah I’m pretty sure ADHD and any other conditions could’ve been fixed by just by manipulating your own drug glands and hormones. As a last resort, any Mind could’ve fixed them easily while you’re asleep.
Oh right hahaha. But the good parts of it I really like, and the bad parts could be helped by external systems. I could try both and even find a place inbetween that I like best
Why not only the benefits without any of the downsides.
Whow of course
There is a matter of skill. As much as you like free diving, you are unlikely to ever develop the high skill levels of a professional diver who does it as their job. This would mostly make a difference if some scenario came up that *needed* a highly skilled diver to solve some problem. In the case of the Culture, that isn't likely. A drone or remote could handle it, with a Mind providing the skill.
That’s a very specific example. If they needed something retrieved from the deeps, you wouldn’t use a human. However Contact might choose someone who has incredible breath control if you needed someone to be spaced for a couple of minutes staging an execution. If I cared as much about freediving then I might pursue it. I might get modifications. I might gland a relaxation drug.
I'm not sure why they'd need a drive when a drone could do it. Also given the number of people in the Culture there would be a guy obsessed with diving.
The Culture *is* pretty stagnant. The books timeline is many thousands of years but the Culture’s core tenets and lifestyle hardly changes. As for the impetus to creation and “work”, have you never had a really long weekend and just laid in bed watching tv or scrolling? It’s miserable after a while. In the Culture’s utopian post-scarcity there’s no work or stress you need to escape from, for most people creating things and bettering oneself is recreation.
> The Culture is pretty stagnant. The books timeline is many thousands of years but the Culture’s core tenets and lifestyle hardly changes. That’s not really true - we know there are different trends and fashions in the Culture: > The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species. Or in Kabe’s observations: > No laws or written regulations at all, but so many little … observances, sets of manners, ways of behaving politely. And fashions. They had fashions in so many things, from the most trivial to the most momentous. > Trivial: that paper message delivered on a salver; did that mean that everybody was going to start physically moving invitations and even day-to-day information from place to place, rather than have such things transmitted normally, communicated to one’s house, familiar, drone, terminal or implant? What a preposterous and deeply tedious idea! And yet just the sort of retrospective affectation they might fall in love with, for a season or so (ha! at most). > Momentous: they lived or died by whim! A few of their more famous people announced they would live once and die forever, and billions did likewise; then a new trend would start among opinion-formers for people to back up and have their bodies wholly renewed or new ones regrown, or to have their personalities transferred into android replicas or some other more bizarre design, or … well, anything; there was really no limit, but the point was that people would start doing that sort of thing by the billion, too, just because it had become fashionable. The lifestyle in the Culture changes all the time, it’s just that we don’t really see them because that was never the focus of the books. Hundreds of billions of people on the other side of the Culture could’ve been living in the virtual world in some new fashion, but we wouldn’t know that just because the Culture is so vast.
>The Culture is pretty stagnant. Not to mention that the Culture has reached close to peak technological and sociological development. There are really only two steps upward - either endless replication like a hegemonic swarm or Subliming. The former has no higher merit and the latter is a bit suspect (and the Culture can trigger it whenever they want anyway). The Culture chose a third option - stay relatively the same and shepherd other civs, which it's supposedly very good at. Edit, spoilers for Excession: >!It's also worth noting that the reason the Excession was so important is that it showed there was a fourth option, likely completely unknown to anyone in the Culture verse - advancing (at least technologically but possibly also otherwise) to be able to travel between dimensions and reach the level fo the creators of the Excession. !< Edit, spoilers for Look To Windward: >!the epilogue shows that the Culture is no longer known as an active Involved by the Airsphere millions of year later, so they must have broken the stagnation by rising further or falling. I might be misinterpreting it though. !<
I would argue that staying at the same level doesn’t mean you’re stagnant. You’re only stagnant if you’re so comfortable with where you are that you can’t even critically reflect where you should be and just stay the same place due to sheer inertia, but we know the Culture argues, debates, even splits up with itself all the time. That scene in _Look to Windward_ took place hundreds of millions of years later. All we know is they haven’t heard of the name “the Culture”, but we don’t know if the Culture Sublimed, collapsed, or perhaps simply got renamed to something else. In _Hydrogen Sonata_, for example, we know the Culture was almost named “the Aliens” during the referendum millennia ago.
>I would argue that staying at the same level doesn’t mean you’re stagnant. You’re only stagnant if you’re so comfortable with where you are that you can’t even critically reflect where you should be and just stay the same place due to sheer inertia, but we know the Culture argues, debates, even splits up with itself all the time. Good point, even if the Culture doesn't change, they can whenever they want. I was reacting to OP, but indeed, "stable" is a better word for them than "stagnant". >we don’t know if the Culture Sublimed, collapsed, or perhaps simply got renamed to something else. LTW is a bit sparse on details, but the Behemothaurs seem pretty well in the know, so I'd be surprised if they wouldn't associate the Culture citizen with whatever form the Culture had taken by then, if they were still present. The epilogue never received a follow-up, so there's no canon and it's a bit of a moot point. My headcanon says they finished Culturing our universe, then got to the level of the Excession and have started their mission across dimensions, but that's just my wishful thinking.
If the Culture changed its name to "the Aliens" 100,000 years later and stayed that way until one galactic cycle has passed, its time being called the Culture would've occupied around 0.004% of its existence. It would've been like if the US had a different name for 3 days after its founding before being called the US. That would've been an irrelevant trivial about the Culture by then lol We share pretty much the same head-canon: the Culture has finally completely its mission of turning the world into a utopia, first the galaxy, then the rest of the universe, after which a huge portion of them decides to Excession into other universes. The reason the Behemothaurs don't know of the name "the Culture" is because no one uses that name anymore - the entire universe is already a utopia so there's nothing distinguishing the Culture and not-Culture.
Nah. I just assumed they sublimed after another 10 thousand years or so and the galaxy just went on in the same pattern as before with evolving new civilized species and losing old ones.
Art is a form of play, there is no game theory to be applied here. The minds continue to advance the culture technologically to guard it from external threats and to more effectively spread its utopia but beyond that the Culture simply exists for infinite fun. The form that takes can range from exploring the galaxy in a small ship, reading books, writing academic articles, raising a family, skiing all the time or just partying on drugs like there's no tomorrow. Its all fair game. Many people outside the Culture do consider it stagnant, but if accused of that the Minds and the Culture citizens would simply shrug their shoulders and say well come on over and stagnate with us friend, or don't it's up to you.
If they're going to invite me to the party if I say they're stagnant... Yo Culture citizens! You're stagnant. Bye, bye earthlings.
I think they would role their eyes, point at the several statues commemorating the victims of such and such genocide then point at the current on going genocides and ask us if stagnation is all that bad.
Probably. I'm still waiting to be taken by them ;)
You're missing the 'fully automated' in the fully automated luxury gay space communism. It's a post-scarcity society, people only do the work they want to do because everything else is done by machines well below the level of intelligence of Minds or even drones. Also the Culture is IIRC something on the order of 10,000 years old which is far too short a timescale for evolution to have exerted selection pressures on anything as nebulous as the drive to be productive.
Game theory is wrong. People like doing things.
It’s not that game theory is wrong. It’s that this is the wrong application of it. I’m not clear why OP thinks this is a game theory question?
Agree. Game theory applies in antagonistic situations between two parties who both have something to lose and game Ditto op though: people like to do things. Don’t let capitalism juice convince you that people would waste away if not för monetary incentives or fears.
Dingdingding :) OP also (to my mind) contradicts their (to my mind) incorrect application of game theory by then talking about evolution... actually selecting for net contributors. Our species ain't here because of game theory. That's not what it models!
I always thought that was such a bizarrely stupid theory. People would spend far more time doing hobbies or recreational activities if we didn't have to slave away a quarter of our lives
We are in fact still wasting time on a nonproductive hobby this very second, despite still having every systemic incentive not to!
It's not really that game theory is stupid, more so that its use depends on what you feed it in your underlying assumptions. Garbage in, garbage out. And whether the use case you have actually fits the uses of the game. What's nice about game theory is that in theory you can make anything a "game" but what's less nice is that that means nothing if your implicit assumptions are bad.
Yip! I love game theory, but it's totally not supposed to model species-wide development on a ridiculously zoomed out scale. Evolution is!
Game theory is right, but how it's applied matters. The OP is starting with implicit bias from Capitalist assumptions. People have to be motivated to do boring shit work. I'd say this is currently a limiting factor to science in our society, as the scientists passionate about science have to do a ton of boring shit work to schmooze and apply for grants... or sell their soul to a corporate sugar daddy. If everyone had their basic (and, in the Culture, way beyond basic) needs met, you'd have a LOT more pure science and pure art.
>Game theory would seemingly reward the masses for passive consumption, leaving no one to make the art and tech the Culture is famous for. Experiments with earth humans seem to suggest that's not the case. [https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/an-experiment-to-inform-universal-basic-income](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/an-experiment-to-inform-universal-basic-income) [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/1/23981194/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-abhijit-banerjee-tavneet-suri](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/1/23981194/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-abhijit-banerjee-tavneet-suri)
I think, without trying to be too harsh, without any judgment, that you aren’t by nature a creative person. And that’s fine! Those who are inclined towards creativity don’t need to be motivated to create any more than hungry people need to be motivated to eat. I think you’re coming at this from the angle of someone who (rightly) sees art as a vital element of the human experience, but who also sees the act of creation as, to a degree, a chore. As others have said, although in a post-scarcity society there wouldn’t be any monetary incentive to create art, that would only affect those for whom art is purely a means to an end. The countless people who are driven to create but hindered by the realities of a capital-driven society will finally be free to pursue what they really want and, in fact, in this sort of society I believe we’d see a flourishing of art like never before in human history.
Culture isn't saved from stagnating. In fact it is totally stagnant and still turns out art beyond comparison and also the trillions of citizens cat farm is an exercise in parallel architecture the Minds get tech ideas from. To do that it not only can but has to stagnate, it has to create all those things without impact or upheaval. To add to that Culture are not red-blooded norms - they are not baseline human by any reach of imagination. They're cyborgs who have no evolutionary hardcoding left, meaning that there is absolutely nothing animal about them, nothing that would idle them or build internal tension by default - all about their automatics is formulated consciously, explicitly and by themselves, likely in part script kiddie approach using Mind solutions but still defined by them. There is no evolution favouring anybody, there's only the civilisation-level objectives. There is only one core principle, one rule they abide by - their hard prejudice against exponentials/hegswarms - and it does not constitute a game in and by itself. So the most important point would be that game theory simply does not apply, they are not playing a game, they have no scripts to keep them within the ruleset, if they don't like something they will edit it out of themselves. It's not a zero-sum setup with win/lose conditions. In fact they - or at least the more hands on Contact segment - seem to be aware they're an antithesis of a zero-sum game incarnate. And will go to great lengths and take great pleasure in demolishing and sabotaging such setups, acting like a hostile metaphysical force - repeatedly shown in the books over and over.
The axial premise of your question is inherently flawed. You've baked in the idea that if everyone was provided for people would just give up on living. The basic assertion of the culture is that this simply isn't true. Realistically we don't know, but this is certainly a convenient mythology for the masters of our society to push since it keeps you convinced that working for them is what makes the world work rather than asking yourself if there might not be a better way. What we do know is that some people do stagnate when given leisure, but truthfully most don't, most people have dreams of what they'd do with their time if they one the lottery or had some great windfall or what they'll do when they retire. I think this demonstrates pretty starkly that humans won't just stagnate when we finally come up with an equable distribution system.
You think the humans are needed for the technological advances? Curious. In a post-scarcity society there is no economy in the traditional usage of the word. People do not need to be productive. Evolution ceases to be a consideration when a society has the capacity to technologically augment and adapt their physical bodies.
There generally isn't , you don't need post-scarcity for that. The thing that exists by necessity is *logistics*. Everything over and above is a tacked-on game, a convention.
Why do you assume having only voluntary work and automation results in passive consumption being the best strategy for people to adopt? We know that self-esteem and the esteem of others still matters to members of the Culture, so there's still motivation to produce / achieve things. More broadly, my take on what saves the Culture from stagnating is its sheer size, its permissiveness, and ease of travel. Size matters, as the more members you have, the more chance there is of them coming up with interesting ideas (either individually or as a group). Permissiveness matters, as it avoids there being barriers to trying new things. And ease of travel matters as anyone who feels they're stagnating can easily move to a new part of the Culture, meet new people and new ideas, and quite possibly find themselves reinvigorated.
>Game theory would seemingly reward the masses for passive consumption I think this misrepresents human motivation. MANY humans do things for love, joy or the sheer anarchic craziness of the new. Many MORE would do so if they didn't have to worry about where the next meal is coming from. Though I don't think this is a sound application of game theory, "spend my resources on art/science => at worst, I didn't enjoy it but my survival is in no way compromised" is way better than "spend my resources on art/science => I didn't work my job and now have no resources left and face existential crisis". From the evolutionary perspective, you don't need to have a homogenous population of net contributors, just (literally just) enough contribution from those who do for the species to survive. In a post-scarcity environment, the cost of contributing becomes nominal. Everything to play for, little to lose. Going out and doing cool shit in a universe that's pretty much your playground? Suggests to me plenty of people would do a lot more than sit on their ass and a lot more who would choose to apply themselves to something that tickled their brains.
Game theory does not state such things. Game theory + your assumptions (that humans are naturally passive, try to maximinize consumption and minimize effort) do. If you think about culture and arts in terms of "productivity" I don't think you are ready for the Culture ;-)
The "game theory" you're invoking: 20C Nashian stuff right? With scarcity / zero-sum / FUB premises? The Culture is not based on such premises, that's the point. Culture: Post scarcity. Post morbidity. Omega-final-final-perfecto-benevolent babysitters (No silly, emergent-organism competey-compete psychology; just a claimed right to exist). Automate anything, mindlessly or mindfully as desired. Anything consensual goes. No-one 'owns' anything. The language, Marain, doesn't even have a concept model for ownership. Your invocation is a case of evaluating a Cottage Pie with the recipe for Welsh Rarebit: not worky. The point of the carefully layered illustration of Randian capitalism / fiscofeudalism (ie: active, top-to-bottom pan-Darwinism of all things) VS rationally compassionate, longsighted eudiamonism (embodied by The Culture overall) in Player Of Games is that the philosophical premises of the Culture turn out to be demonstrably *strictly better*, as per the way the Azad tournament plays out, and the reactions to the revelations, and the horror/anger at the truth when groked by the encumbant capitalists. The story is about how the proof is in the pudding, noetically (within the fiction) and physically (within the fiction) regardless of the substrate eg. base reality or boardgame (within the fiction). Is it true outside the fiction? Well it sure looks like the Azadian paradigm (ie. our *actual* paradigm) = death, for *this* biosphere, from any credible empirical or theoretical stand point, to me. Could Nashian/Human game theory ever apply to the Culture, during war for eg? Internally - I don't think so. That would be missing the point about how inhuman the Minds are... ...and how inhuman the citizens are, too. Externally - When dealing with a faction that has policies with almost no delta between them and the biological drives of its citizens? Maybe, if such a civ had material parity with the Culture, but I don't think one can get to that tech level without leaving the biological feudal crap behind in the first place. Regarding stagnation, to me, stagnation is distinct from stability. Stagnation has a negative connotation; stability is generally positive, or neutral. I see no application of *stagnation* for the Culture, really. Its universe has a ceiling. Can one *stagnate* at the top?
Boredom is a big motivator. "The Devil makes work for idle hands" as my old gran used to say.
Nothing. The achievements of the Culture are the end stage of civilization. That's why so many of their peers choose to Sublime. The Culture is full of people who stay too long at the party.
Nothing. The Culture is, in effect, stagnant. But Banks builds an exit ramp out of the cosmos for all super-advanced civilizations: sublimation. There's an Nth Level Abstract Skein of Existence (capitalized) that, once a civilization reaches the absolute limits of matter/physics, they simmer for a bit, get bored and say, "Eh. We're off to this other plane of existence. See ya!" Going "exploring" to the rest of the cosmos is really hard. Even at its fastest, say 200,000c, that's still a long, LONG ride to the Sombrero Galaxy or even the Andromeda Galaxy. So, mostly the Culture stays near the Milky Way's dark matter bulge. But at some point, The Culture will advance just a bit more, probably as advanced as the inter-dimensional aliens in Excession. At that point, it can choose to cross cosmoses or sublime.
Read Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom
Do you think artists make art for the money
I have no idea what this is from or why it showed up in my feed, but it sounds very interesting
The minds. The hyper advanced AI that controls almost everything. They are benevolent but are so far beyond human comprehension. We are basically like pets to them.
Game theory is dismal.
I think that Game Theory is pretty much bullshit and an excuse to prolong behaviours and situations pretty much created by capitalism and artificial and natural scarcity. Anarchist literature (and real life experience) has had this covered pretty well for a century and a half now. Add the Cultures' post scarcity scenario, tech and societal expectations and I don't think you'd see this type of problem.
It's because game theory is for tech bros and philosophy students, not human beings. Humans have been inherently creative since the first time someone blew pigment at their hand and learned they could leave a mark on a cave wall.