Another one of those moments when I find myself very much in the same camp as Alan Jacobs, who is here responding to a THORT LORD bit on the future of writing in a world where AI is a thing.

Part of my reaction might well be due to the THORT LORD in question, because when I hit this line:

What seems to be missing here is the question of why the people who now pay Noah Smith to write wouldn’t just cut out the middleman, i.e., Noah Smith.

… my immediate response was “oh wow, if only“. A world in which Noah Smith was unemployed would probably not be a nicer world, but it would at least be one which contained a little glowing ember of schadenfreude to wrap one’s hands around.

But the closer is also relevant:

I think Smith and roon don’t consider that possibility because they have another planted axiom, one that can be extracted from this line in their essay: our AI future “doesn’t mean humans will have to give up the practice of individual creativity; we’ll just do it for fun instead of for money.” But we will only do that if we have time and energy to do it, which we will have only have if we’re not busting our asses to make a living. Thus the final planted axiom: AI and human beings will flourish together in a post-scarcity world, like that of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels.

I mentioned my interest in Jacobs’ take on Banks’s Culture stories before, but that quote above gets exactly at the core of it, and of my own beef with those books. To reiterate: I love the Culture novels, they’re a big part of why I’m a writer, and Banks was by all accounts a very decent bloke; I am not here to bash on Banks or his works. But as Jacobs illustrates here, the Culture is a long way from being the socialist utopia it’s often assumed to be, and is much closer to being a liberal technological utopia.

This is probably why I was a lot less shocked than others at the prospect of Amazon making TV out of them: the Culture (or a very superficial engineer-brain interpretation thereof, at least) is exactly the fantasy of Progress that Bezos and other pajandrums of the Valley seem to sincerely believe themselves (increasingly contrary to their actual actions) to be working toward.

Whether Banks truly believed in the possibility of benign god-level artificial intelligences as a route to utopia, or whether they were more along the lines of a plot device that enabled the utopia to be entertained as a fait accompli, is a question I am not equipped to answer… though I think it worth noting that, given the extent that narrative informs our ability to think about futures at all, the difference between those two possibilities is a lot thinner than it might initially appear.