The Culture is a vast, interstellar civilisation that has existed for around eleven thousand years. Its citizens, who are capable of faster-than-light travel, visit Earth in 1977. They watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and are mildly amused. Ultimately, they decide that humanity isn’t ready to join them (probably after listening to The Eagles), and bugger back off into space.
The Culture is the brainchild of the late, great science fiction novelist Iain M. Banks. It is the most fully realised literary example of a post-scarcity society – a community of such unimaginable productive abilities that material need has simply disappeared.
The citizens of The Culture have access to a mysterious, unlimited energy supply known as “the grid,” which they can harness to build virtually anything, including artificial planets. The distribution of resources is handled by benign and staggeringly advanced artificial intelligences called Minds, who can administer entire worlds with a fraction of their powers. All essential work, including physical labour, is undertaken by non-sentient robots. No sentient being – whether human or AI – is required to work.
Banks was a politically astute writer who combined the best elements of liberalism, anarchism, and socialism when designing The Culture. Because nobody needs to work, the entire system is an egalitarian, voluntarist, and pacifist utopia. The guiding principle of The Culture is non-aggression, and its citizens – their lifespans lengthened to 400 years by genetic engineering and advanced medicine – can engage in whatever (peaceful) practices they wish.
The Culture has realised the age-old dream of eliminating scarcity, but Banks also shows the extreme lengths to which technology must go before this can happen. We humans in the 21st century still face the twin threat of exponential population growth and looming ecological disaster and, unlike The Culture, we can’t simply build new worlds on which to live. Even so, areas like genetic engineering, nuclear fusion, nanotechnology and robotics could soon advance to the point where human labour becomes redundant. By the end of the century, the entire human race could become members of the leisured class.
Let There be Light
The Culture has been described as an “ideal-type” liberal society. It carries liberal aims to their ultimate logical conclusion, and is the culmination of ideas that first sprang up during the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.The Enlightenment was an exciting and revolutionary time. The old feudal system was being pushed out by the vastly more productive forces of capitalism, figures like Copernicus and Newton were beginning to show us the vast potential of science, and a new generation of intellectuals sought to bring about secular societies that were guided by reason.
Liberal philosopher David Hume captured the mood when he blamed violence not on clashes of ideas, or human passions, but on scarcity. The world’s finite supplies of resources, combined with our limited benevolence, mean that we are destined to either squabble amongst ourselves or devise systems of “justice” by which to forcibly distribute these resources; either way, coercion and violence are the inevitable outcome of scarcity. This provided a rallying cry for scientists and liberals alike: eliminate scarcity, and we can (in theory) liberate ourselves from violence.
This seems to create an easy out from even doing politics in the first place. If we can avoid all need to use force by instead focusing on relieving scarcity, shouldn’t we do so? This impulse lies behind the oft-quoted socialist ambition of “replacing the government of man with the administration of things,” an ambition The Culture has fully realised. As one commentator has put it:
“The Friend-Enemy distinction is no longer meaningful, the free-rider problem has been solved (in a way, everyone is a free-rider) and tough decisions about the allocation of resources have disappeared. … The Minds can make mistakes … but they can’t make political mistakes because they aren’t making political decisions in the first place.
“Humans could not be at the heart of such a world. In vesting all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, AI Minds, Banks knew what he was doing. This is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved – by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control.”
Yeah, But They Could Kill Us All
In April 2000 Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article for Wired magazine entitled “Why the future doesn’t need us.” He predicted that by 2030 we will have designed a robot so advanced that it is superior, in evolutionary terms, to humans. From this point, Joy claimed, humanity will face inevitable extinction.When discussing advancements in robotics, computer scientists and science fiction writers often speak of a “singularity” – a point beyond which events can neither be predicted nor controlled. This singularity is the point at which we design a robot that is itself capable of designing an even more complex robot, and so on. This will snowball until the power of robots far outstrips that of humans, and humanity can be wiped out at a stroke, possibly at the hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It is for this reason that Isaac Asimov devised his three (later four) laws of robotics: 1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. To these Asimov later added “a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
In Banks’ Culture series, the Minds roughly follow Asimov’s laws; the de facto leaders of The Culture, they are benevolent forces who stand to gain nothing from humanity’s destruction. However, such is the intellectual superiority of the Minds that the point of humanity seems somewhat lost, as the following passage suggests:
“… because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes ‘treatment’ to cure his ‘problem.’
“Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them ‘sublimate’ their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”
Those words come not from Banks but from the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematical genius who became an assistant professor at Berkeley at the age of 25. Kaczynski was so concerned about the encroachment of technology on modern life that in 1978 he began a 17-year bombing campaign against universities and airlines, killing three people and becoming known as the Unabomber. He blackmailed the New York Times and Washington Post into publishing his manifesto, which led to his identification and arrest, and is currently imprisoned for life without parole.
In intellectual circles, Kaczynski is an uncomfortable enigma: a terrorist and all-round crazy fucker whose insights about the dangers of technology are as incisive and relevant as any in the field. Even beneath perfectly benign and humane masters, such as the Minds, a society with sufficiently advanced technology threatens to destroy life’s sense of purpose. Once technology surpasses humanity, what is left for us to do?
Who Cares, Let's Get Fat
Perhaps it’s a sign of my rapidly advancing years, but I love to put my feet up, have a nice hot cup of tea and watch a movie. As humans, we long to be rid of discomfort and inconvenience. Most of those who reject material comforts do so not because they are suspicious of these comforts, but because they are afraid of taking more than their fair share, or feel too much solidarity with those whom wealth would leave behind. If given the choice, and spared these qualms, most of us would gladly delegate life’s hassles to various labour-saving devices. Eventually these devices will improve in scope and effectiveness, to the point where we won’t have to get out of our seats for anything. We will just exist, in our comfortable floating chairs, as contented, useless, bloated blobs of flesh.This is the future envisioned by Pixar in the film Wall-E – a future in which hedonism has gone too far, in which humans have been removed from all negative stimuli and, as a result, have lost the corresponding idea of pleasure. They have been relieved of the burden of walking, and have become fat and lazy. They have been saved from the occasional discomfort of face-to-face interaction, and have become unfulfilled social retards who communicate only via screens. Needless to say, their lives are next to worthless.
Because Wall-E is a blockbuster, there’s actually an evil robot orchestrating these events behind the scenes; and because it’s a kids’ film, humanity redeems itself and rediscovers its connection with nature. But neither of these plot developments were inevitable: humanity is more than capable of setting itself on this path, and we are by no means bound to awake from it.
Angst-Ridden Germans
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that we were already on this track; that our collective obsession with comfort – “decadence,” as he put it – will eventually lead to an incurable stunting of the human race. Nietzsche thought that we will eventually reach a tipping point, where our intellectual, moral and physical degeneration passes a point of no return, and we would be doomed to evolve into the “last man” – a pitiful, lackluster imitation who eventually grows tired of life and simply gives up. Before we reach this tipping point, Nietzsche argued, there must be a dramatic intervention by great men (I would say “people,” but Nietzsche was a notorious misogynist) who would snap the masses out of their complacency with acts of outstanding creative genius. Kaczynski probably thought this was what he was doing.Because after all, why the obsession with comfort? What are really hoping to achieve with science and technology? Of course, these seem like stupid questions with self-evident answers; but they only seem self-evident because we rarely stop to ponder them. Theodor Adorno, another angst-ridden German philosopher, put the answer in particularly stark terms: science is the attempt to control and dominate nature.
In a sense, Adorno is obviously right. At the end of the day, the ultimate aim of any scientific achievement is to overcome a limitation that nature has placed on us. While Hume saw this as liberation, Adorno saw it as oppression – humanity turning the tables and making nature its bitch. A Jewish exile during World War II, Adorno’s philosophy is dark, grim, and heavy with suffering: one of his books is entitled Reflections from Damaged Life. To be honest, I preferred Wall-E.
Adorno tore asunder the supposed alliance of science, “reason,” and liberalism, and declared the Enlightenment a failure. If we expect science to teach us new values, Adorno warned, it will only teach control and domination; the Enlightenment project will lead not to the humane, benevolent utopia of The Culture, but to eugenics and fascism. Rather than a freakish moment of violent collective irrationality, the West had actually been building toward Nazi Germany for some time.
In case I’m accused of breaking Godwin’s Law in relation to the entirety of science, it’s worth pointing out that no, science is not inherently fascist. In fact, our society has roundly rejected the horrors of the early twentieth century, and this has come at no great detriment to science. Still, this rejection was not a scientific rejection, but one based on a fuzzy, unscientific, and not self-evidently “rational” sense of moral outrage. We decided we simply didn’t like fascism; indeed, we hated fascism, and hated it with a passion, not with a sense of intellectual detachment. And in all these warnings about the dangers of technology, it is this passion that separates us from machines, and that, from Bill Joy to the Unabomber to Wall-E, we perceive to be under threat.
I'm With Woody
Despite his apocalyptic predictions, Bill Joy ends his article on a note of optimism – with a reference to that great twentieth-century thinker, Woody Allen:“Do you remember the beautiful penultimate scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen is lying on his couch and talking into a tape recorder? He is writing a short story about people who are creating unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.
“He leads himself to the question, ‘Why is life worth living?’ and to consider what makes it worthwhile for him: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘Potato Head Blues,’ Swedish movies, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, the apples and pears by Cézanne, the crabs at Sam Wo’s, and, finally, the showstopper: his love Tracy’s face.
“Each of us has our precious things, and as we care for them we locate the essence of our humanity. In the end, it is because of our great capacity for caring that I remain optimistic we will confront the dangerous issues now before us.”
As Joy points out, the ultimate question is one of value. Science alone cannot give us values, and mere faith in science and technology leads to a confused or empty worldview. This is why technology will never make politics obsolete, as Banks and his kin have hoped. And as we march towards an ever more streamlined and mechanised future, it’s a truth well worth remembering.
