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I have only read Excession so far and am getting started with The Player of Games and I was wondering to what extent the sentient AI constructs are effectively forced labor. The obvious purpose of drones for example is that people don't have to perform manual labor, and it just seems kinda handwaved that drones don't really mind cleaning up after everybody and are really enjoying themselves, and I cannot help but wonder what a Mind does when it gets bored of running an Orbital or some backwater colony, or to a lesser extent the sentience of some guy's living space. Is there a procedure to transfer them to a new spaceship or something or are all of them forcibly programmed to enjoy whatever they were constructed for? I cannot wrap my head around the social dynamics between human beings and AIs that are thousands of times more intelligent yet happily ferry the humans around space or build space statins for them or let them hold positions of authority.  vvv yeah infinite fun space is mentioned in Excession. I was mainly wondering what kept AIs doing their job, not what they'd do if they weren't. Vanadium fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jun 6, 2011 |
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Jun 6, 2011 16:29
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LtSmash posted:From the description of Culture life in Excession with the girl who is a contingency backup (I can't remember her name) it sure looks like a good deal of the Culture is a never ending supa-soap-opera. I just realised I already forgot what anybody in Excession who wasn't the Sleeper Service was doing with regards to the plot. I'm not good at books.
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Jun 8, 2011 04:20
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LawrenceOfHerLabia posted:I think it was The Land of Infinite Fun, and it was mentioned in Excession. It was all a bit hand-wavy and out of place I thought. Still, Excession was fun. Meatfucker is still my favourite culture character. Although I wouldn't call it that to its face. You wouldn't have to say it out loud, you know.
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Jun 9, 2011 00:26
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I've only read a few Culture novels, so this is probably a dumb question, but is there room in the Culture for a human who needs any of the Culture's crazy high-powered scifi technologies for their hobby/profession without relying on some artificial sentience? If someone is into large-scale landscaping, can they get hand-held field projectors and effectors and just go to town on some remote bit of an Orbital, or if someone wants to jet through the universe and see all the stars or whatever in person, can they get a ship that's reasonably fast(er than light) and just aim it in the right direction, or does everything that's more complicated than board games and mountaineering require a super-intelligent chaperone?
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Jun 11, 2012 05:43
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Yeah, but when it comes down to actually putting her designs for floating volcano islands into practice, does she have to find some AI of some sort with a huge effector strapped to it who wouldn't mind spending a while moving all the rocks around, or does she have access to non-sentient force-field machinery for that kind of thing? I mean it's probably not like the Hub would mind hanging out a bit and shuffling some slaved drones carrying flower pots around, but I didn't get the impression that humans were still equipped to do anything about ren-faire style arts and crafts on their own.
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Jun 11, 2012 05:51
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Do Minds have names separate from the names of the structure they're running? If a GSV is run by three minds do they each get to make up their own snarky gravitas-lacking names or how does it work? I don't remember seeing it spelled out.
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Jun 13, 2012 00:56
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Man I totally didn't realize that when I read that part. That ought to be the worst mode of existence in the culture (discounting being the AI in some gross nerd's suit).
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Jun 13, 2012 01:42
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Just started reading Use of Weapons, got to the first Zakalwe bit where he visits the ethnarch... 
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Jun 23, 2012 04:23
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It could have done with some more sympathetic human viewpoint characters. 
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Jul 11, 2012 03:15
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Am I misunderstand how in-construction orbitals work or are they gonna have a hosed day/night cycle if there's still plates missing? I guess it's not too bad if you don't live right next to a missing plate, welp Vanadium fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Aug 11, 2012 |
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Aug 11, 2012 05:45
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I really wonder how that State of the Art story would have read like if it had been set like 35 years earlier.
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Aug 22, 2012 15:39
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Saros posted:Massive Hydrogen Sonata Spoilers. Mods, namechange to this please.
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Oct 22, 2012 20:47
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Pope Guilty posted:and Banks is quite clear that he's kind of an unlikeable dick. Isn't that all of the male protagonists in the Culture books?
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Nov 7, 2012 09:36
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:DeWar is, at worst, a former unlikeable dick. I didn't read that book because it didn't have A Culture Novel on the cover. 
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Nov 7, 2012 09:45
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From my reading of the book the Surface Detail hells are literally just everyday VR environments, tuned by assholes. There's nothing metaphysical or Sublime or supernatural about them, they're just simming the involuntarily-backed-up mindstates of people whose flesh bodies died. At least from the perspective of the Culture, it doesn't really seem any different from recreational VR, from people having given up their biological bodies to live in some ship's substrates, or from people being stored without their meat hulls being conserved, like the people in (Hydrogen Sonata) Gzilt society that were stored in preparation for Subliming, unless I totally misread that. That's also why I couldn't really get behind the quietudinal service. It seemed like a really weird fetishation of a completely reversible and normal, by Culture standards, state of existence, which could easily be handled by whatever Mind is closest. Having this apparently really important and solemn group play a (supposedly?) really important role in Culture society and the events of the story without having been so much as hinted at in previous books came off as a fairly lame way to lend the whole contrivance more weight than it really deserved.
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Nov 15, 2012 17:14
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I've wondered for a while what Culture (or other sufficiently advanced) ships look like in more-than-three dimensions. Since Culture ships tend to have silly, flat, 3d humans living on them, I kinda assumed they were just your average 3d spaceship except for the Mind(s) extending into some abstract higher dimensions, and jumping into a non-euclidean starwars-like hyperspace mainly for beating the speed of light. But with the ease that in Hydrogen Sonata the Mistake Not... confounded the Gzilt warship by navigating the local hyperspace as if it's really just another handful of additional directions and nothing abstract, I have started to think it's probably more complicated than a flat 3d structure wrapped in a 4d field enclosure. Presumably ships also turn a bit in funny 4d directions when they're navigating hyperspace, so if they were only three-dimensional, wouldn't they appear two-dimensional in 3d space when not perfectly aligned with it? Do ships have TARDIS-like interiors that don't conform to their exterior as perceptible by humans and get really confusing to walk around in? Is the volume of a ship measured in m^4? What does that even mean for its mass, and energy requirements to get moving? Can other advanced Culture sentients move in four dimensions or does it take the power output of a ship to turn in funny directions? Less Fat Luke posted:What I kind of found weird at the end of Surface Detail was the fact that the Culture ended up just carpet bombing the hidden substrate processors containing the Hells. Like, really? Wouldn't you at least try to recover some of the minds uploaded into there? The ones that had just been brought into the Hell would be sane and probably happy to be rescued from there. Surface Detail talk: The minds uploaded to the hells were those of legitimately dead people, and the Culture generally doesn't seem to generally be in the business of resurrecting everybody from other civilizations or even offering them alternative afterlives. Still-living people connected to them would presumably be perfectly fine after their destruction like real-world Chay was. Oblivion seems like a decent enough outcome. Vanadium fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Nov 19, 2012 |
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Nov 19, 2012 15:42
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and not the country-sized Sleeper Service dashing across half the galaxy to plunge itself and a few thousand ship-sized knife missiles into a seemingly aggressive spatial anomaly at a few thousand times the speed of light?
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Dec 24, 2012 21:49
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Not sure how I feel about the Culture being directly responsible for a basically apocalyptic event to bring about societal change, that's some straight-up comic book supervillain plan.
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Jul 19, 2013 00:43
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Also he was constantly an rear end in a top hat to his suit and module, good riddance.
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Sep 7, 2013 02:50
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I guess among other involved civilizations, dropping a spaceship-god in human form into a conflict between less advanced civilizations might be looked upon less favorably than just sending that one un-augmented not-even-properly-Culture dude in on a space taxi.
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Jan 12, 2014 14:50
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I think looking at it from the other side is also interesting. Sure, after you die while lava rafting and they put together a perfect duplicate of you with all your memories somewhere in a smug GSV's bioengineering tube, maybe it's not really you and you are really dead for good, but at least all your family and friends and whoever else still get to hang out with someone close enough to you that they won't have to mourn you. Good enough.
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Jan 14, 2014 14:36
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Someone whose first Culture book was Excession said the shy dude showed that there's room in the communist AI utopia for people like that, not only for people who enjoy partying 24/7 while lecturing in important fields in various space universities and shepherding lesser civilizations towards enlightenment, and that it's one aspect that makes the Culture feel a lot more like a respectable utopia and not just some heroic-anarcho-primitivists-with-godmachines jerkoff fantasy. ymmv vv
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Oct 14, 2014 22:12
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It's probably also smart enough that it doesn't really matter whether it reconstructs the overall state of the Galaxy from the Grey Area's mind state or from any other Mind.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:54
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It's actually a fully functional if slightly eccentric knife-missile having a grand old time after talking some gruff pirate guy into whistling its theme song whenever it does something badass.
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May 27, 2017 14:36
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