4/5/2017 The 

novelist who inspired Elon Musk | 1843

THE DAILY
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

THE
NOVELIST
WHO
INSPIRED
ELON MUSK

If you want to understand where society is heading, read the

novels of Iain M. Banks, Silicon Valley’s favourite author

TIM CROSS

Elon Musk, the world’s most restless entrepreneur,

has embarked on yet another venture. Not satis埛�ed with
reusable rockets, electric cars, giant batteries, vacuum
trains and underground roads, his latest 埛�rm, Neuralink,
hopes one day to build a working brain-machine interface
(BMI), which would let its user control computers simply by
thinking. The idea is not new – scientists have been
experimenting with BMIs in labs for years – but Musk’s
involvement will sprinkle it with stardust.

As any entrepreneur will tell you, the 埛�rst thing your

product needs is a catchy name. “Brain-machine interface”
is a bit clunky, so Musk has plumped instead for “neural
lace”, which is short, memorable and glamorous. Science
埛�ction fans will recognise it from the “Culture” novels of
Iain M. Banks, a Scottish writer who died in 2013. In those
novels, a neural lace is a BMI that is implanted when a
person is young. It grows into and around their brain,
acting like a souped-up WiFi connection that allows
humans to communicate, and commune, with the ultra-
advanced arti埛�cial intelligences that run the show.

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This is not the 埛�rst time Musk has raided Banks’s work for
inspiration. SpaceX, the rocketry 埛�rm he founded in 2002,
owns two ocean-going barges that serve as mobile landing
pads for its rockets. One is called Just Read the
Instructions, the other Of Course I Still Love You. Both are
named after sentient spaceships in the “Culture” books, all
of which have similarly playful names (one warship, which
spends most of its time waiting idly to be called up for
action, is called the Killing Time.) Musk is not the only
“Culture” fan in Silicon Valley. In 2015 Mark Zuckerberg
chose “The Player of Games”, the second “Culture” novel,
for his fortnightly book club.

Perhaps the books are just light bedtime reading. But

perhaps not, because they explore many of the themes that
are worrying the tech world at the moment. The Culture is
a society in which virtually everyone’s job has been taken
by robots. Arti埛�cial intelligence (AI) vastly exceeds the
organic sort. The spaceships and arti埛�cial worlds on which
Culture citizens live are run by Minds, machines that are to
humans what humans are to ants. (Those worlds are criss-
crossed by high-speed trains that run in a vacuum, another
technology that Musk is trying to develop.) Drones –
machines with intelligence roughly equal to that of
humans – are citizens just like their biological
counterparts.

Musk, like many other people these days, spends a lot of

time thinking about AI and where it might lead. In 2015 he
helped found Open AI, a non-pro埛�t foundation that
explores how best to ensure that AI ends up serving
humans, rather than displacing them. Banks's novels,
some of which are 30 years old, take the idea of machine
intelligence just as seriously. Killing a machine is as grave a
crime as killing a biological person; the relevant moral
metric is the capacity for su埢�ering, not the stu埢� of which a
given intelligence is made. He gives his machine
characters complicated inner lives just like those of his
biological ones. In one scene in “Consider Phlebas”, the
埛�rst Culture novel, a human mountain-climber brings a
drone some 埙�owers from a remote outcrop as a gift; the
drone re埙�ects on how touched it is by the gesture, and how
it would die of shame if that sentimentality became widely
known.

To self-doubting tech lords, the series is a reassuring tonic.

The Culture is a utopia in which the promise of AI has been
realised and its pitfalls avoided. The Minds are mostly
benevolent gods who ensure that both humans and drones
are as happy, safe and ful埛�lled as possible. Dignity is no
longer tied up with work. Nor is survival, for his machine-
run economy generates an almost inexhaustible material
abundance (a group of modern left-wing economists have
dubbed such a state of a埢�airs “fully automated luxury
communism”). With no need to work to survive, humans –
who, thanks to advances in biology, can switch sex at
will and live to be hundreds of years old – are free to do

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whatever they like, whether that is climb mountains, enjoy

games, or just indulge in a great deal of drugged-up, sex-
fuelled hedonism.

But Banks is too talented and cynical a writer to make his

utopia perfect. Many of his protagonists are dissatis埛�ed
with an easy life, and 埛�nd themselves on the fringes of the
Culture’s perfect society. Liberated from work, the Culture
has become obsessed instead with fashion, fads and the
minutiae of social hierarchies. And AI gods, even
benevolent ones, come with uncomfortable implications:
Banks is teasingly unclear whether humans (and drones)
are anything more than indulged pets for the Minds that
really run the show.

Musk has voiced similar concerns. “We’ll be like a pet

labrador if we’re lucky,” he said in 2015, when asked about
the relationship humans might have with super-intelligent
machines. Similar worries are the ultimate reason behind
Neuralink. Only a technologically-augmented human
brain, Musk thinks, stands any chance of being able to
keep pace with the arti埛�cial sort, and Neuralink is the 埛�rst
step in building such a brain.

All of this may seem impossibly grandiose. Worries about

hyper-intelligent computers keeping humans as pets can
seem almost insultingly theoretical in a world where
billions of people do not even have reliable electricity. But
science 埛�ction is a literature of ideas, and, as John Maynard
Keynes once remarked, the world is ruled by little else. The
“Culture” series is not a blueprint for the future of the
human race. It is high-concept knockabout space opera,
with all the technological handwaving (faster-than-light
travel, mega-structures the size of planets) that implies.
But it is space opera that anticipates some of the
challenges that technology is beginning to pose in the real
world, and which are of great interest to the sort of people
who are building the future in which we will all soon have
to live. If you want to understand the thinking of today’s
tech titans, Banks’s novels are a good place to start.

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Tim Cross is a science and technology correspondent for

The Economist

KEYWORDS: ELON MUSK, IAIN M BANKS

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