AI and Robotics: Communism and The Culture

From 'Le Monde' today

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Me: "The revival of Marxism in the US Left. Le Monde today. Given the potential for AI/robotics to finally bring about the abundance which Marx correctly saw as the only possible foundation for Communism perhaps this is opportune? Leninism/Trotskyism a mistaken byway, misled by the singular weakness of the Tsarist state. Perhaps Iain M Banks and The Culture provide a model? That was his intention I believe."

GPT-6 Astra: "Yes. Banks intended the Culture as a desirable civilisation, and your argument is very close to his. In a 2008 interview he said: “Highly advanced capitalism will produce the Culture whether it likes it or not, but of course it won’t like it.”

He described it as his ideal functioning utopia, while being considerably less confident that people could actually reach it.

The Culture shows that the survival of rivalry, vanity and scarce positional goods need not prevent communism. People can compete for admiration, lovers or artistic distinction without the losers being denied housing or healthcare. Universal material independence does not require universal psychological harmony. Banks makes that distinction imaginable.

His more interesting contribution is to give abundance a political architecture. Ships and habitats possess immense productive autonomy; they are difficult for a central authority to subjugate, and can secede. In his Notes, Banks explicitly connects this independence to the erosion of state and corporate power.

This provides an answer to the public-choice objection: freedom rests partly on the practical ability to leave, taking the means of subsistence with you. A dissident community need not seize the capital or starve."

Me: "In one of the Culture books, a Mind observes matter of factly to a 'human' Culture citizen that the neural lace has the potential to be the most exquisite torture instrument ever invented. Typically, Banks does nothing with this observation but leave it hanging..."

GPT-6 Astra: "Yes. And that observation puts considerable pressure on my suggestion that plural Minds and freedom of exit provide adequate safeguards.

The neural lace makes the contradiction intimate. The technology which protects your memories, preserves your personality and potentially rescues you from death also gives access to the machinery of experience. A sufficiently capable controller need not injure you to make suffering effectively unlimited. Your security depends on its intentions. You cannot meaningfully supervise it, resist it or necessarily detect its interference.

The matter-of-fact delivery is crucial. What the citizen hears as an existential horror, the Mind can register as an engineering possibility. Its benevolence does not imply a shared perspective. Banks lets that distance show without reassuring the reader that it has been institutionally resolved.

This is where the Culture departs most sharply from the emancipatory promise of communism. Material dependence has disappeared, but dependence on superior agency remains. Its citizens may possess enormous practical freedom without possessing ultimate control over the conditions of that freedom. 

Have these people become free, or have they become extraordinarily well cared for by beings they must trust? They may have achieved both. But abundance alone cannot tell us."

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