> I'm not sure 'Pets and clowna' really describes the relationship very well. Certainly the AIs find humans fascinating, amusing and exasperating - but I find h

> I'm not sure 'Pets and clowna' really describes the relationship very well. Certainly the AIs find humans fascinating, amusing and exasperating - but I find humans that way too. The 'parental' might be a better description of how most AIs treat humans - apart from the 'unusual' AIs I think "pets" does describe the relationship pretty well, and your attempt to refute it just confirms it: pets are "fascinating, amusing and exasperating" and cared for by humans in a kind of pseudo-"parental" relationship. It's not a true parental relationship, because pets will always and forever be inferior. That inferiority means their direct influence on the "society" they live in is pretty much nil, and they have no agency and are reduced to being basically an object kept for the owners own reasons. That's exactly what's going on in culture universe: the minds keep the humans for their own reasons. The culture (as depicted) is no longer the story of the humans in it, it's the story of the minds.