Vavatch

I wonder if that was some inspiration for Iain M Banks' Culture series, in which citizens are able to change their sex at will over the course of about a year. Banks wrote specifically about what this signified for civilisation: > 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. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

This is Banks' own essay on the Culture, in case you really don't want to read the books: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm (another page that can use Firefox's Reader Mode). What the books add to all this theorizing is that they're wildly entertaining. To me, they're the best that modern sci-fi has to offer, and Banks is sorely missed.

No mention of The Culture? I suppose it's not "history" per se, it's quite recent. For interested people, a short description of The Culture, as written by the author, can be found here: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm In short, it's literally "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" and it's viewed by many as a perfect utopia. A few take a dimmer view, in my opinion because it exposes the underlining meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe. The Culture forms the background for a excellent series of books written by Scottish author Iain M Banks; I fully recommend it.

Amazing article. Explained it roughly how I always assumed it as being, but far better than I ever could have. Also, interesting link from there on The Culture, another of my favourite scifi universes: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

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…

> Seems like a good place to chime in with my personal anxiety about AI: that each citizen will have an AI assigned to spy on them full time. Reminds me of the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. They use AI drones to prevent criminals from reoffending by constant monitoring. > The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

Its hard to have a plot in a utopia, so most of the books are about Contact between the Culture and other societies. Some of it is 30 years old now so perhaps my enthusiasm for the early ones is because I was 30 years younger when I read them. But still they stick in my head as a positive vision of future society. I can't think of that many other futures that have stuck with me in the same way. You can read them in any order. The earliest one (Consider Phlebas) I never much liked. Use Of Weapons was my favourite. Player Of Games was good too. If you were only going to read one, probably Excession - it is the most sweeping, epic one. Some of the later ones are good. If you just want the overarching ideas, they are explained in an essay called A Few Notes On The Culture which he posted to newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written in 1994. Copied here: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

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.

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…

You're probably referring to A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks [1] [1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

It has been a while since I read any of the books but I feel like this is a thing that is explicitly noted in the text of the books here and there. It's certainly in "A Few Notes On The Culture", a post Banks made to rec.arts.sf.written back in 1994: "Humans and independent drones (the Culture's non-android individual AIs of roughly human-equivalent intelligence) are unnecessary for the running of the starships, and have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites." (taken from a copy found at http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm)

Iain M. Banks did a far better job with this concept in his Culture[1] novels. In short sure, if you just want to eat a lot of steak or be a god in your local reality simulating VR or something you're good to go, but if you want to be a galactic kingpin not so much. And on the scale where the real players are playing, it comes down to matter. There's plenty to go around, but don't get greedy. [1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

Iain M. Banks had a much more nuanced take on this in A Few Notes on the Culture [http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm] (free to read online), where his general point was that things like the Culture's drug glands should be taken as contraindicators by the government that they're messing up in reality and need to do better. Ready Player One's problem as a movie/book is really that its not interested in exploring too much detail about how this world came to be, so you get fairly trite morals like that. Like you could imagine a much longer epilogue where the protagonist uses his wealth to improve society, reduce poverty, advocate for governmental change, provide refuge for domestic abuse victims, and uses individual participation rates in the Oasis as a barometer for his success. Which wold be a real interesting moral for a mainstream movie to include.

A more reasonable modern "left pole" in sci-fi is the Culture series, where the Culture is explicitly a post-scarcity society described by Banks himself as "socialism within; anarchy without" [1], and where Banks as an unabashed socialist actually did spend time thinking and writing about how he saw the implications of that (and how he saw this as rising out of the post-scarcity society he envisioned). Star Trek is much more ambiguous about it - they pay lip-service to the post-scarcity line, but still have people working jobs that seems unlikely to be attractive in a true post-scarcity situation, for example. [1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

A few notes from the author might be useful there: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

This may of interest to anyone who is unfamiliar with his SciFi writing: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm Originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written on 10 Aug 1994.

I like this. I would add to this: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm for an idea of how a leftest libertarian Utopia might look. Your link mentions Ken MacLeod, I think Iain M Banks also has something to contribute here.

> I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :) > I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name. > I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at. I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it. Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

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;…

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%3Dstrip…

I really enjoy Iain Banks but I don't think he's particularly popular with Reddit-style futurists. Passages like this one usually make em balk: Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm