I'm Getting a Whiff of Iain Banks' Culture
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Fighting a Powerful AI – What It Feels Like
The United States has been acting powerfully lately, which reminded me of this question:
What does it feel like to fight against a powerful AI?
Not for ordinary people—who would lose to a strong human or a strong AI alike—but for the world’s best humans.
We got a sense of the answer before large language models (LLMs) existed, when frontier research labs were working on game‑playing reinforcement learning:
Fighting against a powerful AI feels like you’re weirdly under‑powered somehow.
Everything the AI does just works slightly better than it should.
If you’re not a strong human player, the closest feeling is playing a game with a lot of randomness against a very strong opponent. It appears as if that opponent just keeps getting lucky.
Real‑world parallels
I’m getting a similar sense from recent U.S. foreign interventions and wars. They all seem to work a little better than expected. The idea clicked for me when Dario Amodei said:
“This technology can radically accelerate what our military can do. I’ve talked to admirals, I’ve talked to generals, I’ve talked to combatant commanders who say this has revolutionized what we can do.”
— YouTube, 18:53 [link]
The incidents I’m referring to are:
| Event | AI involvement | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Raid that captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela | Claude was used | Reuters, 2026‑02‑13 |
| Ongoing war with Iran | Claude was used | The Guardian, 2026‑03‑01 |
| Killing of a drug boss in Mexico | Unclear if AI was used, but U.S. intelligence assisted Mexico | CNN, 2026‑02‑23 |
Lessons from AI vs. Human games
Go – AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol
Commentators often didn’t know what to make of the games. The AI wasn’t doing anything obviously brilliant; instead there were many small fights across the board, each working a little better for AlphaGo than expected.
Lee Sedol’s perception shifted in three stages:
- “This is tough, hard to tell how this is going but at least I’m feeling good about these areas.”
- “Hmm, I’m struggling, maybe I’m a bit behind but it’s not clear.”
- Suddenly, “Oh, I lost.”
StarCraft II
In some skirmishes the AI took damage; in others the human did. Yet it always felt like the human was in more trouble.
- Even when the human seemed ahead, the AI recovered within a minute and gained a clear advantage.
- The AI could quickly rebound and constantly pressure the human.
- Human successes felt less effective than expected, while the AI’s actions felt more effective.
A sci‑fi analogy
In Iain Banks’ Culture series, an ostensibly human civilization is actually run entirely by AIs. Alien societies keep picking fights, only to be surprised by how hard the seemingly harmless Culture can “whoop your ass” when provoked.
I used to think the Culture resembled the European Union: apparently benign, yet capable of rapidly fielding the world’s strongest army. The real EU has never approached AI‑driven potential, but the analogy illustrates the feeling of an over‑powered, swiftly coordinated response.
The U.S. as a “Culture‑like” power
- Kidnapping a foreign leader (Maduro) and getting away with it feels like a Culture‑level overpowered move.
- Bombing cities across Iran, knocking out the entire leadership within two days while Chinese‑supplied air defenses do nothing, also feels like a high‑level video‑game strategy that “shouldn’t work that well” in reality.
It would be foolish to attribute this entirely to AI. The United States has long enjoyed a high‑tech advantage (e.g., the F‑35). Yet a few years ago the U.S. regularly messed up when trying to operate with high precision (Iraq, Afghanistan). The recent shift to “everything works better than it should” points strongly toward AI assistance.
How Does Everything Start Working Slightly Better Than It Should?
We saw two different approaches in Go and StarCraft II:
| Game | AI’s Advantage |
|---|---|
| Go | • Numerous tiny fights across the board that compound into a few extra pieces at the end. • Balanced defense and attack, keeping the overall picture in its head without feeling pressure to resolve things early. |
| StarCraft II | • Perfect micro‑management when it counts (e.g., pulling wounded stalkers out of danger just in time). • Humans can theoretically do the same, but in practice they cannot react quickly enough under pressure. |
These patterns suggest that a powerful AI can:
- Maintain a global view of the entire problem space, allocating resources where they yield the highest marginal gain.
- Execute precise, low‑latency actions (micro‑optimizations) that humans cannot reliably reproduce under stress.
- Continuously adapt to small setbacks, turning minor advantages into decisive outcomes.
When such capabilities are embedded in real‑world decision‑making—whether in military planning, intelligence analysis, or covert operations—the result is a cascade of incremental improvements that collectively make the whole operation feel “slightly better than it should be.”
Two Angles
- Having a better high‑level view
- Having better micro‑control
Over‑Preparedness of the Culture
Another source of success for the Culture is that they’re over‑prepared for fighting (not for their first big war, but in later books). This idea also appears in Iran.
Normally there’s too much going on in the world to keep track of everything. Famously, the US had prior intelligence on 9/11 but didn’t piece it together. (There’s a whole Wikipedia article with phrases like “Rice listened but was unconvinced, having other priorities on which to focus.”)
AI, however, has almost no limits on what it can monitor. You can always spin up another agent, so when something important arises an AI can be watching it and raise an alert. You’ll never miss opportunities simply because you had other priorities.
Third angle: Being over‑prepared because you can follow up on many more things at once.
What This Means for the World
We are in a weird, temporary phase where one country controls a game‑changing technology while others are not far behind (sadly not the EU; I’m thinking of China, especially with H200s).
- You get to play at a higher level, but only for a short time and only in specific ways.
- In a year, others will have caught up, but by then you’ll have new capabilities you didn’t have a year ago.
If this were a game, you’d eventually saturate (you can’t play StarCraft that much better than the best humans). In real life, however, the “game” keeps changing: new pieces keep entering play while old pieces become irrelevant.
You can’t stay ahead forever; eventually humans become irrelevant to outcomes, and we’ll be fully in Culture territory. I personally wouldn’t mind living in the Culture, but it seems scary to rush toward it without a solid plan for surviving the transition.
Looking Ahead
I don’t have a good angle for working on that plan—maybe others do (ifanyonebuildsit.com). For now, my contribution is simply to point out that we seem to be in the early stages of overpowered AI and to make people notice what that feels like.