Vavatch

From a link to A Few Notes On The Culture[1] in the discussion on Iain M. Banks’ Why the Culture Wins, from a couple of days ago:

> The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

> It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil.

…

> The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful…

I also note that _The Logic Pool_ is also available in a short story collection of Stephen Baxter's called _Vacuum Diagrams_

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/baxter/index.htm

Quoting from the beginning of the story:

This time he would reach the Sky. This time, before the Culling cut him away... The tree of axiomatic systems beneath him was broad, deep, strong. He looked around him, at sibling-twins who had branched at choice-points, most of them thin, insipid structures. They spread into the distance, infiltrating the Pool with their webs of logic. He almost pitied their attenuated forms as he reached upwards, his own rich growth path assured... Almost pitied. But when the Sky was so close there was no time for pity, no time for awareness of anything but growth, extension. Little consciousness persisted between Cullings. But he could remember a little of his last birthing; and surely he had never risen so high, never felt the logical richness of the tree beneath him surge upwards through him like this, empowering him. Now there was something ahead of him: a new postulate, hanging above him like some immense fruit. He approached it warily, savoring its compact, elegant form. The fibers of his being pulsed as the few, strong axioms at the core of his structure sought to envelop this new statement. But they could not. They could not. The new statement was undecidable, not deducible from the set within him. His excitement grew. The new hypothesis was simple of expression, yet…

This is an idiosyncratic reading that is at odds with Iain M. Banks' own description of the relation between humans and AI in the Culture:

It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and the design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard - I would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further the aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to shortly). At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose on itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.

The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation; at first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later - when the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes less physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather than material.

Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby.

No machine is exploited, either;…

Perfect resource allocation requires a perfectly incorruptible coordinator. Perfect socialism might become possible (and even preferable) if/when AGI is solved.

Iain Banks puts it nicely in his "A Few Notes on the Culture" essay [0]:

"Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

"The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

"It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued…

Iain Banks makes a compelling argument that the answer is a "yes, but with...curious complications", through his exploration of the issues brought up in his fictional universe of The Culture [1], in his series of novels [2] set in that universe. Note that he explores the margins of his universe; for the 99.999999% of the denizens of his universe, "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" totally works swell for their entire lifespans (hundreds of years).

There are some key technical linchpins that make that universe possible, and commensurately unlikely for us in yours and my lifetimes.

1. Near-free, externality-free, near-Kardashev Type II-scale energy ("The Grid" in his universe).
2. Strong AI, replete with emotions and benevolent AI sapients (even though they eclipse human intelligence by far).
3. FTL, anti-gravity, matter manipulation (molecular level at inter-stellar distances) physics we simply can't even begin to prod at.
4. Nanotech.

But that is one heck of a nice universe to strive for and toss the pebbles of our lives into moving towards however infinitesimal, nicht wahr?

[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
[2] http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=iain+banks+culture+series&sprefix=iain+banks+culture+series%2Caps%2C224

One of my favorite sci-fi authors is Ian M. Banks (discussed here on HN with regularity). His Culture series describe a post-scarcity interstellar society of human(oid)s who among many, many things can change their own gender just by thinking about it. After suitable body alteration time, you can be a male, female, or even something in between (that happens to be important part of one of the characters in one of the books), with most citizens transferring back and forth at least once to act as both a father and a mother at least once in their long lifetime.

In this society, there is no gender inequality. Ian's own "A Few Notes on the Culture" essay http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm states it best:

A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established.

Until our science invents this, this is a great thought experiment to conduct.