Absolutely, its a novel and there are around 50 trillion 'baseline' humans not that different from us. Banks himself has said he has focused on writing more abo

Absolutely, its a novel and there are around 50 trillion 'baseline' humans not that different from us. Banks himself has said he has focused on writing more about people who are edge cases or less normal in the culture to keep things interesting, and at that scale there will be a lot of people at the tale ends of the distribution. IMHO the culture novel is as close to a far out tech utopia as you can write without making humanity completely unrecognizable while creating interesting stories that have general scifi appeal. It deliberately breaks tropes such as the machines having more personality than the humans and adds a good dose of British humor. I see it as inspiration for what our AI & other tech could lead to, a bit of a thought experiment and less as a verbatim ideal.