Une interview de Iain Banks

[jerome]

Iain Banks est en interview sur son propre site : www.iain-banks.net

Petit extrait à propos de la Culture :

"From Bruce Attenborrow:
Q: One of the key aspects of the Culture's ability to perpetuate itself is the essential reliance it has on the Minds. You mentioned in the previous Q & A that the Culture's Minds find the Culture itself interesting and therefore continue to work in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship (or at least, they appear to). What, in your opinion, is it that the Minds find so interesting? Why don't at least some of them turn on the Culture and cut loose? What is it philosophically and moralistically that keeps them on the straight and narrow? Could the Culture exist without the Minds?
Neurons (via gerard79 @ sxc.hu)The idea is that the Minds find us interesting the way we find our pets interesting. We're their fish tank, their ant farm, their Sims.

The assumption is that AIs so many generations down the line from when their human (or whatever) instigators created the first generation will be free of any prejudices or drives (or the equivalent of drives) those biological designers might have included in the AIs' design, deliberately or otherwise. So they'll be vastly wise - and may well have something like a drive in the shape of a thirst for knowledge - but they'll also, arguably, be almost too perfect, too powerful, too self-sufficient. They'll need something to keep their interest in the mundane workings of reality, and the humans in the Culture provide that.

Those humans are far better-behaved and much less neurotic and psychotic compared to us but they are still humans, with a collection of drives, needs and desires that produce behaviour a Mind would find fascinating, and something worth caring about.

As humans, we feel both tenderness and a duty of care towards those who are relatively powerless, weak and vulnerable compared to ourselves - whether it's towards our own children or animals (especially when they're cute). I'm suggesting that even without deliberately designing it into a Mind, there would be a similar or at least analogous feeling or urge in those Minds - based on a shared ability to look at the universe and both to wonder and to reason - sufficient for them to find it rewarding and even pleasurable to cooperate with and to some degree look after the humans involved.

However, some of the Minds do just bugger off after they're completed, and the Culture accepts this degree of apparent waste as part of the price for creating AIs which are their own entities - individuals with genuine personalities - rather than just carefully designed components of the civilisation.

My feeling is that there will be ways for any currently existing generation of Minds to tweak the properties of the next generation (I'd assume there would be a smaller likelihood of the sort of apostasy mentioned above occurring during what one might term the war economy necessary for the successful waging of the Idiran War, for example) and the extent and frequency of such tweaking would be something that would have evolved and developed over time, so that by the time the Culture stories are set this has become a mature technology.

I don't think the Culture as it is portrayed in the stories could exist for long without the Minds. They anchor it; if they all suddenly disappeared (and in a sense kept on disappearing even when new ones were created) it would drift, eventually, into a different civilisational course. Arguably it would drift into the main sequence of galactic civilisational development, describing what the elder civilisations (who, as mentioned in the Appendices section of Consider Phlebas, take an interest in such matters) would recognise as a more familiar arc within the space of developmental possibilities, moving towards conventional Sublimation rather than sticking around - engaged, in-play and just generally interfering - as the Culture is, quite deliberately, doing.

I also think that just knowing the Minds are there - and relatively accessible - makes a huge difference to the average Culture citizen. They make it easier to enjoy the Culture's nearly infinite pleasures with a clearer conscience. "

Toute l'interview est là