Comment by deeThrow94

> The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality.

The difference is that there's no need to build AIs with "motivation". Computers don't view us as anything right now, even if they're better at working with bits than us. What would change this in your mind?

Naturally, we will anyway because that's a short-cut and we're not very imaginative. But any kind of AI that would want anything will have to be explicitly built by us.