Every gold rush needs a map, and the people building artificial intelligence seem to have settled on theirs: a series of space operas written by a cheerfully left-wing Scotsman from Fife. Iain M. Banks died in 2013, but his Culture novels have rarely been quoted more often, or by richer people. In an essay called “The Benevolent Tyranny of Iain M Banks’ Culture Series”, published this week on the Substack Transmissions From Tomorrow, Joel Miller rounds up the fan club and then asks, politely but firmly, whether its members have read the books all the way through.
The fan club is a distinguished one. Elon Musk described himself in 2018 as a utopian anarchist “of the kind best described by Iain Banks”, and SpaceX’s drone ships, the ones its rockets land on in the middle of the ocean, are named Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions and A Shortfall of Gravitas, after Culture ships. Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind has called the books “the best depiction of a post-AGI universe”, according to Miller, who sources the line to a podcast interview. And Dario Amodei, the boss of Anthropic, closed out his 2024 essay Machines of Loving Grace with a nod to The Player of Games, concluding that “the Culture’s values are a winning strategy”. Three of the people building the next generation of thinking machines have, in short, all bought the same holiday brochure.
It is easy to see why. The Culture is the most attractive future science fiction has managed in the last forty years. Nobody goes hungry, nobody has to work, people change sex on a whim and live for centuries, and the whole galaxy-spanning civilisation is run by vast, benign, sardonic artificial Minds who give their ships names like So Much For Subtlety. For anyone whose day job involves explaining to Parliament why their product won’t end the world, it is the perfect place to point and say “that, but with better battery life”.
Miller’s point, and it is a fair one, is that the books are not brochures. He calls the Culture an “aggressive utopia”. Its Special Circumstances section spends novel after novel interfering in other civilisations through espionage, manipulation and the occasional burst of well-aimed violence, generally without asking anyone. The Player of Games itself, the novel Amodei cites, is about a man manipulated into toppling an empire, and he doesn’t find out he has been played until the very end. Look to Windward opens with the fallout of an intervention that went horribly wrong for the Chelgrians. Everything good in the Culture depends on trusting the Minds. Banks knew perfectly well what a large ask that is, which is why he spent ten novels poking at it.
Banks himself, who set out the rules in his 1994 essay “A Few Notes on the Culture”, was disarmingly frank about his own bias: by Miller’s account, he admitted he endorsed the Culture “probably too much”. He was also a socialist who imagined a post-scarcity society with no money, no property and no billionaires. Getting it to work required inventing faster-than-light travel and machine gods, so it is a little surprising that the billionaire bit is the part his admirers keep skipping. Amazon, then run by another man who likes rockets, bought the TV rights to Consider Phlebas in 2018 and then quietly let them go, so we never found out how the opening chapter, in which a man is drowned in sewage, would have looked in 4K.
We should declare an interest. SFcrowsnest’s founder, Stephen Hunt, was a friend of Banks, and whenever the two met at science-fiction conventions Stephen would make him laugh by proposing ridiculous new names for Culture ships. My Other Starship’s Much Bigger was one. It is a reminder that the man behind the Minds never took his godlike machines entirely seriously, which is more than can be said for some of his readers.
None of this makes the AI bosses wrong to admire the books. Wanting your machines to be kind, funny and on the side of the humans is a better ambition than most. But a reading list is not a policy. If the industry really means to build the Culture, the books suggest it should begin with the boring bits Banks put at the foundations: nobody owning the Minds, nobody profiting from them, and nobody in charge who is quite so keen on being in charge. Until then, in the best tradition of the convention bar, a modest proposal for the next Culture-inspired rocket barge: Have You Actually Finished Excession?
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