Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
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Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#2“If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks,”
Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#3I've said before that Musk must have read Surface Detail and assumed Veppers was some kind of 'tragic hero'.
It is remarkable because Banks, as much as I love his writing, is __rarely subtle__ about his beliefs and who the "good guys" are.
(Yes there is a lot of exploration of the grey areas and inhumanities, and thereby legitimately critical questions of the titular society- but Bank's himself has said that he would very much like to live in the Culture, even considering all the uglier parts.)
Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#4“If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks,”
I guest Musk cant difference between anarchism and libertarianism
Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#5Ironically the author of this article missed the key theme that runs throughout the Culture novels: Humans are mere pets in a world where superhuman artificial intelligence exists.
Anyone that wants this future for humanity, wants to be a pet, simple as that.
Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#6I'm not so sure about the author's thesis. One quote alone explains it, "it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence." If indeed Musk believes this, then his actions now matter not at all, except insofar as it either helps or harms the birth of "digital superintelligence". This is a similar "ends justify the means" argument to the "effective altruists" and the general idea to "not miss the forest for the trees", the forest being long-term viability of humanity, the trees being individual well-being.
During peacetime, making such an argument justifies the selfish and destructive action they wanted to take anyway. The framing of the assertion is impossible to make an objective assessment of the success of an action, since such an assessment may take a hundred, or a thousand, years. So really there is no way for anyone to judge whether an act is good or bad in this framework, leaving it only as a matter of judgement of the actor. In this sense, Musk's invocation of Banks is simple megalomania with more steps.
Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#7Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#8Ironically the author of this article missed the key theme that runs throughout the Culture novels: Humans are mere pets in a world where superhuman artificial intelligence exists. Anyone that wants this future for humanity, wants to be a pet, simple as that.
Calling it _the_ key theme is stretching it quite a bit imo
Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#9I've said before that Musk must have read Surface Detail and assumed Veppers was some kind of 'tragic hero'. It is remarkable because Banks, as much as I love his writing, is __rarely subtle__ about his beliefs and who the "good guys" are. (Yes there is a lot of exploration of the grey areas and inhumanities, and thereby legitimately critical questions of the titular society- but Bank's himself has said that he would…
> It is remarkable because Banks, as much as I love his writing, is __rarely subtle__ about his beliefs and who the "good guys" are.
My wife writes some fiction, and one thing I've learned from observing her interaction with test readers is that no matter how heavy-handed the writing, a fair proportion of readers will still misunderstand it. It's practically impossible to make anything so explicit that nobody will get it wrong, even with a bunch of repetition.
Though, most egregious misreading activity does seem to be confined to the same set of readers, across discussion of her test-reads, other writers she knows' test reads by the same readers, and just general conversation about other published fiction—that is, certain readers struggle to follow seemingly every damn thing they read, while others almost never make these kinds of errors. I find it hard to relate to wanting to continue reading books while being so constantly confused by their content, but they do it anyway. Completely alien to me, their experience of reading must be rather impressionistic and seems unpleasant, but to each their own.
Re: Elon Musk Just Doesn't Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks
#10I've said before that Musk must have read Surface Detail and assumed Veppers was some kind of 'tragic hero'. It is remarkable because Banks, as much as I love his writing, is __rarely subtle__ about his beliefs and who the "good guys" are. (Yes there is a lot of exploration of the grey areas and inhumanities, and thereby legitimately critical questions of the titular society- but Bank's himself has said that he would…
There was a large section of The Boys viewership that didn't understand that Homelander was a bad guy until season four, or that Walter White was Breaking Bad's biggest villain.
Time after time, an astonishingly large number of readers and watchers assume that main characters are good and are unable to fathom that a main character can be bad. Luckily for the rest of us, this is emotional shibboleth that once identified serves as a high-accuracy litmus test for personal engagement.