"Investing all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, A.I. Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good."
That paragraph is introduced with "As one commentator has said", making it only a single opinion. And I would mostly disagree. Consider Phlebas, The Hydrogen Sonata and Excession show competition on the same level as the Minds, the Excession even beyond their level. And any entity being "too good" is a strange notion, if you consider those entities being many, many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us humans. Why would "truths" about humans apply to Minds? It is like a bacterium trying to extrapolate the true character of humans.
> That paragraph is introduced with "As one commentator has said", making it only a single opinion.
I don't think so: that quote wouldn't make it into the article if it didn't typify a common opinion.
> Consider Phlebas, The Hydrogen Sonata and Excession show competition on the same level as the Minds, the Excession even beyond their level.
I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
> And any entity being "too good" is a strange notion, if you consider those entities being many, many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us humans. Why would "truths" about humans apply to Minds? It is like a bacterium trying to extrapolate the true character of humans.
The Culture is a fantasy, and like most fantasies, it needs some hand-waving "magic" to hold its world up. That's what the Culture Minds are.
> I don't think so: that quote wouldn't make it into the article if it didn't typify a common opinion.
It only needs a printed source to make it into WP. Here it is the opinion of one Chris Brown. No, there is no problem with citing that, but it is hard to estimate how much support is really behind that opinion.
> I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
If you really think there is no internal dispute between minds I will politely ask to read the novels again. There certainly is. Already the existence of the "eccentric" classification gives that away. Why would they need "Special Circumstances" if they were all "of the same mind"?
What is true (AFAIR) is, that they are no battling to the death. However, the point was that minds are not too powerful, if there is competition. That point would still stand with only external competition.
> The Culture is a fantasy, and like most fantasies, it needs some hand-waving "magic" to hold its world up. That's what the Culture Minds are.
Try your hand as an author with the very far future. Unless you go dystopian (and thus denying most of the potential progress) everything after a couple of centuries might well be seen as magic.
>> I've only read two of those, but in both the competition is wholly with external actors. Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
> If you really think there is no internal dispute between minds I will politely ask to read the novels again.
I misstated what I meant a little bit. There are disputes between Culture Minds, but it seems like they're about foreign policy and competing with external actors. They're of one mind about maintaining the "liberal anarchy" within the Culture itself.
As a sibling commenter said, Excession is almost entirely about fleshing out the "society" of Minds and the scheming and politicking that's going on within. It is of course impossible to actually write in-depth superintelligent characters without being a superintelligence yourself, making the Minds in the story quite human-like. Nevertheless the novel shows that Banks was quite aware of the problem of the Minds easily becoming mere dei ex machina – and quite literal ones at that.
Yes, I think that is the main, but inevitable, shortcoming of the Culture novels. The Minds are not too powerful or "too good" (I still cannot get over entities, which are not humans, being described as "too good"... :) ). But they just appear as clever humans in the novels, by necessity.
>> Within the Culture itself, the Minds are of one mind about how to act.
> That's _certainly_ not the case in Excession (I'm assuming that's the one you haven't read?)
I have read that one. I recall all the depicted disagreements were about foreign policy. They're all of one mind about maintaining the "liberal anarchy" the quote referred to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture