Star Trek, The Culture, and the meaning of life: Star Trek and The Culture are two of my favorite science fiction universes. Star Trek is at this point a vast franchise spanning multiple media and decades, but in my mind the central works are the two TV shows, The Next Generation and Deep Space 9. The Culture, on the other hand, is portrayed throughout nine novels by Scottish sci-fi writer Iain M. Banks. It's a safe assumption that most of you reading this will have some relation to Star Trek, but might not have read any of Banks' novels. You should. The two universes have much in common. In it, humans (or at least the humanoid races we identify with) live in vast interstellar polities, respectively, The Federation and The Culture. These polities rely on faster-than-light space travel, and also have other types of highly advanced technology, including matter replicators, weapons capable of destroying planets, fully immersive virtual reality, and advanced AI. In both universes we are able to cure all (or almost all) diseases, although in the Federation people still do of old age. Both the Federation and the Culture are portrayed as essentially forces for good, although, as in most good science fiction, there is no shortage of ethically convoluted situations that challenge this notion. Both universes are beloved by nerds and progressives. And yes, in both cases I'm talking about science fiction from the 1980s and 1990s. I'm 46, why do you ask? Both the Culture and the Federation are in contact, and sometimes conflict, with other civilizations. This includes space-faring societies with similarly advanced technology as well as worlds that have not reached this level of advancement. Some of these pre-space-flight civilizations might be similar to earth during antiquity or the middle ages, whereas others are much harder to classify, because the aliens are less humanlike. Now, here is a sharp and interesting difference between the Culture and the Federation. The Federation has a Prime Directive which forbids interfering with civilizations that have not reached a technological level where they can travel faster than light. Various plots in Star Trek revolve around the ethical implications of this. Really, should you not save this pandemic? It would be so easy… The Culture, on the other hand, has no such misgivings. They meddle incessantly in the internal affairs of lower-tech societies. In fact, many of the plots in the Culture series take place within civilizations which are in some ways less developed than the Culture, where Culture special agents carry out various missions, sometimes military in nature. I find this contrast very fascinating, especially as both of these sci-fi series were originally conceived against a background of decolonization and the Vietnam war. Both the Federation and the Culture are meant to be utopias: they are post-scarcity societies, free from oppression. Societies where it's good to live. But for different kinds of people. The Federation is centered on Earth, and largely populated by ordinary humans, the descendants of you and me. The Culture, on the other hand, is populated by a human-like species that is the result of genetic engineering. They are similar to us, but also have internal drug dispensers in their brains and half-hour orgasms. Utopian. Now, where am I going with this? I promised you something about the meaning of life in the title of this post. So let's get to the point. There is a striking difference between Star Trek and the Culture series that I would like to discuss. It's about agency, and AI. The Culture is largely run by Minds, which are artificial intelligences that are “a million times as intelligent” as the humanoids that populate the Culture. Each Culture planet, orbital, or major spaceship has its own Mind, which in turn controls a large variety of robots of different kinds. The Minds are sentient, but most of the robots are not. Culture citizens live a life of luxury and abundance, where all their material needs will be satisfied by the Minds and their robots. They just have to ask, and it will be done. Reading about the Culture might make you think of the phrase “fully automated luxury communism”, the title of a book by Aaron Bastani that has since become a meme. Banks, however, would rather characterize the Culture as a form of anarchism, as there are no laws or rules of any kind. People mostly behave nice towards each other because they are, well, cultured. However, the Minds do keep track of things, and will stop you if you try to murder someone. What do people do all day in the Culture? It seems most of them hang out, socialize with each other, and spend time on their hobbies, which include various games. They eat good food and have good sex. Some of them engage in construction or landscaping, and some of them cook food for others. All activities are voluntary. Nobody really owns anything, but most Culture citizens respect others’ wishes for privacy. Because these people can live for as long as they want to, they are rarely in a hurry. Life in the Federation is quite different. As most of Star Trek takes place on spaceships and on various non-earth planets or space stations, we don't get to see much of what life is like on earth. But we can extrapolate from what we are shown of life in space. Apparently, the Federation has done away with money, and everyone has a good standard of living. There is no poverty. But everyone has jobs, or at least tasks and responsibilities. And the world is most definitely run by humans. There is a political-administrative structure, where decisions are made by human leaders that have been appointed or elected. And there is ample room and need for human expertise: the starship Enterprise has dozens of scientists of various kinds, as well as medical staff, military and security expertise, engineers, teachers, and of course a bartender. The list of roles on the space station Deep Space 9 is even more varied, and includes merchants, spies, a tailor, diplomats, religious leaders and so on. Throughout the series, there are many references to music, plays, novels, and other works of art or scholarship authored by humans. This is clearly a human-centered world. High-tech, but the machines are in our service. It's not that the Federation lacks computers. Starships have central computers that interface with or control all their myriad subsystems, and communicate with the crew in natural language. The ship computers can also generate completely lifelike virtual reality simulations, complete with highly sophisticated non-player characters. As far as we can tell, these compåuter are extremely capable. There are also various handheld devices, such as tricorders, which are multi-functional sensors which seem to rely on some serious compute. But computers are always tools for humans to use. They do things humans can't do well or don't like to do. And they are never treated as independent or sentient beings. (Except for the android Commander Data, but he's unique.) This difference in the role of AI has major implications for how stories are told in these two fictional universes, and indeed which stories can be told. In Star Trek, stories take place both on Federation starships, space stations, and planets, and in interactions with aliens and mysterious entities of all sorts. Perhaps the most common setting in The Next Generation is the bridge of the starship Enterprise, where crew members solve problems together. Part of what makes Star Trek so appealing to me is how the plot typically hinges on the unique knowledge and personalities of the core crew members. This is a world where human expertise and judgement is crucial, even in the presence of computers that are much more advanced than ours. And it is a world where humans are entirely dependent on each other. Just like ours. The stories in the Culture novels, on the other hand, take place almost entirely outside of the Culture. At least the good parts. As the Culture is constantly meddling in alien civilizations, or sometimes just spying on them, they need to send human operatives to these civilizations. Humans apparently blend in much better than robots. And that's how Culture citizens find themselves in unfamiliar environments, in harm's way, without being able to count on the support of their superintelligent overlords/babysitters. Which is, in turn, how Banks is able to write such good stories in the Culture universe, including some thrilling action sequences. (Apparently Amazon licensed the novels to develop a TV show based on them; I'm looking forward to the results.) Life inside the Culture is portrayed in the novels, but mostly as a backdrop to the actual action. We get prologues, post-mortems, flashbacks. In case there is some drama inside the Culture, it almost certainly revolves about what happens in its periphery, where it interfaces with lesser, weirder, or more warlike civilizations. The reason for this is almost certainly that it’s very hard to write good stories that take place entirely in an AI-driven post-scarcity utopia. Perhaps even impossible. For interesting stories, you need some kind of conflict, and choices with real consequences. In the Culture, nothing you do has much consequence, you can’t really change the world, and you’re not really needed. The citizens of the Culture are like kids in a kindergarten, acting in a constrained and safe space under the benevolent watch of their teachers, who keep telling them that their Lego builds and crayon scribbles are amazing. Now ask yourself: would you rather live in the Federation or the Culture? For me, the answer is simple: I want to live in a world where interesting stories can take place. This means a world that revolves around humans. Where humans call the shots, make discoveries, and depend on each other. The hedonistic utopia of the Culture would get old very quickly for someone like me. If you believe that the meaning of life is (at least partly) self-actualization, then the choice should be easy for you, too. One does not achieve one's full potential in kindergarten. If you're an ambitious person, who wants to do something big, the choice should also be easy. One cannot do anything big if one cannot have real impact on the world. The boundlessly ambitious people who build fast-scaling AI companies so that they can usher in radical change in the world would certainly hate life in the Culture. We may (or may not) one day be able to develop the kind of AI technology that could do everything we do. If that happens, how do we make sure that our society becomes like the Federation and not the Culture? I don't know. I am not saying that we should stop developing artificial intelligence. I am, after all, an AI researcher. And for all we know, better AI will help us with (or be necessary for) stuff like curing all diseases, traveling across the galaxy, or making Earl Grey tea in a matter replicator. But we have choices about which directions to develop technology in. And we certainly have choices about how to use it. All our technology is constrained by laws and cultural norms regarding when, where, and how to use it. Mobile phones, cameras, guns, cars, money, toys, make-up, musical instruments - we have rules for all of them. We are very much at the starting point for creating cultural norms for what kind of AI use is fine, which kind if forbidden, and which kind is technically legal but incredibly gauche. They say that politics is downstream from culture, and, assuming that is true, we have a lot of work to do in shaping culture.