I see he's been re-reading some of The Culture (or the Wikipedia summaries of it describing "slap drones") and not grokking it: I can't remember where I first s

I see he's been re-reading some of The Culture (or the Wikipedia summaries of it describing "slap drones") and not grokking it: I can't remember where I first saw someone compare him to Joiler Veppers, but the character was the worst of all selfish, lawsuit-happy, billionaire playboys who lack empathy. Slap drones only work in The Culture because the society is so different from ours, and also because it's fictional: everything from the biotech being so much more advanced than us that even the organic Culture citizens are as artificial* as their drones, to their AI being smart enough to run billions of organic minds as simulated consciousnesses, to their society having no money and the closest it recognises to private property being thoughts and memories. Reality does not have these advantages. * In that they're engineered, not that they're manufactured, though they could clearly create replacement bodies for your consciousness if you died and wanted to be downloaded. That said, we're increasingly artificial ourselves; I think it's something like 75% of the nitrogen in our bodies and 25% of the carbon is from the Haber–Bosch process and the burning of fossil fuels respectively?