The Post-Scarcity Leviathan

A frightening thought experiment.

What would you do for God? Well, that depends on what God would do for me. Then again, that’s just the Western way of thinking about an infinitely powerful supreme being. It’s why Pascal’s Wager makes sense. The last thing you want to do is end up on the wrong side of infinity.

This rationale is compelling and also dangerous when you put aside the infinite and deal with something like Krell level powers. Or just all the power humanly imaginable, which actually isn’t that much, but as far as human experience is concerned, borders on the miraculous. Such things are well within the human imagination. Magic is on the near side of the inconceivable.

The first atomic bombs were magic. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to conceive a world where Hitler got them first. The stunning book on that, by the way, is Fatherland by Robert Harris. I want you to remember that in light of the first question. What would you do for Hitler? Well that depends on what Hitler would do for me. You’d wager that the last thing you want to do is end up on the wrong side of the nuclear Third Reich.

But what if we were talking about a condescendingly benevolent super-powered mega-intelligence capable of granting you so many wishes that you would live long enough to get bored with the observable universe? In fact, what if those gods operated, so far as humans are capable of understanding, on principles as well understood as The Golden Rule? That’s what I would call a post-scarcity Leviathan. Their existence in a volume of galaxies near and far, including our own, is the premise of a legendary series of science fiction literature known as The Culture. Its author is the late Iain M. Banks.

These Leviathans are known to readers of books like Consider Phlebas, the first in the Culture series of novels, as Minds. Minds as in starships of unimaginable powers that are autonomous thinking machines capable of FTL travel, printing manufacture in every element and compound and administering justice on a cosmic scale. Laser beams? Check. Zero point energy? Check. Hyperspace, force fields, neural implants, reincarnation, cross-species rebirth, self-initiated glandular juicing, yeah yeah no big deal. Whatever you want, puny human. Just don’t violate the Golden Rule. Or as mega-daddy would say, don’t make me stop the car.

Occasionally various warlike alien rival species get into tussles because of their weird religions. For the most part, the Minds have a sort of Prime Directive and leave them alone. Them, meaning barbarian races outside of the Culture. But since they (how many are there? maybe a dozen or two per galaxy) have super-genius 7 dimensional chess skills, they’re very good at predicting when these skirmishes cross the line of possible extinction or wars spilling over into neutral zones. In such cases, a few Minds get together (as they vary in size, capability and temperament) for a quick meeting and decides to initiate action via Special Circumstances. (SC)

So what would you do for God? Occasionally some creature gets selected by SC which essentially grants them a couple upgrades on the order of an Infinity Stone or two and they become super[human]. As such they are capable of doing the dirty work of the Culture which is beneath any Mind’s planet wrecking contempt. Interplanetary 007s are a dime a dozen. What could go wrong?

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Dystopia Is Halfway to Utopia
As you can imagine, this is incredibly entertaining sci-fi, two orders of magnitude more sophisticated and imaginative than your garden variety highschool geek fandom. So it should come as no surprise that the likes of Elon Musk has named his drone ships after Culture Minds. BTW, I have a list of excellent Culture Ship names myself. I share with you here.

Reading sci-fi is, broadly speaking, where a lot of us geeks get our most furturistic visions. Of course there are all sorts. While most normies like the dystopian, we builders tend to like the utopian. Hackers on the other hand are more reality based. I’ve done most of the genres to death. I’d say Banks’ best work was a toss up between Matter and Surface Detail, but I highly advise you to read Consider Phlebas first, especially if your taste runs towards Star Trek or Star Wars. On the other hand if you actually dig 500 page books, go for those two, or even The Algebraist, which doesn’t involve so much galactic skullduggery, or better yet, The Player of Games, which many say is right on target for the brainy sorts who aim to take over the world.

Now if you haven’t guessed by now, crap people like Sam Altman are saying about eliminating the need for human labor is really straight out of The Culture’s future cosmos. The problem of course is what he thinks is irrelevant. We happen to be literally in the middle of an AI arms race with China, and anybody else who can hack us and use our ‘own’ AI magic to crack our economy. All this blather about superintelligence is all figleaf salad for a superweapon. But before one of them gets lauched like V2s in the Blitz there are going to be many explosions on the launchpad. And don’t forget my prediction. There will be an AQ Khan of AI tech, or has Deepseek already done that?

In this video we are reminded by my goto guy on AI videos that Altman was interviewed by Cade Metz saying:

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

How? Because he’s already seen the future in the post-scarcity visions of the utopian future. Plus, people are throwing money at him. Why not promise transhumanism? I mean all the tests that these AIs are passing are all humans need to know, right?

So here’s the problem, and I know I’ve told you multiple times before, but here goes:

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. -- George Orwell, 1940

In the Culture, Special Circumstances always arise. Why? Because not enough beings have reached a level of sublime transcendence. And they are a territorial species no matter where they go beyond the stars of their homeworlds, with their extended lives and mental backups. Even when they decide to live a couple lifetimes as other species, there is the continuity of selfhood.

The Minds are the military. The Minds are the justice system. The Minds work through the rigorous logic and apply the laws of the Culture. Because humans desire lives of leisure and adventure and isn’t that what we all want? What wouldn’t you do for the blessings of the Mind God? It’s not as if we want human police, after all.

All you have to do is stretch your imagination to its smelly meatbag human limits and ask for the magic. Magic will be done unto you.