Comment by lproven

> so banning AI is a necessary plot device.

Absolutely. Walter Jon Williams explicitly made this point in the introduction to the Praxis trilogy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Empire%27s_Fall

He said that to make space opera work, you needed to not have omniscient AI, FTL travel, and nanotech that could work miracles, resurrect the dead, and give lifeforms superpowers.

So, how to forbid it, when someone somewhere will try very very hard to make it?

By imposing a cultural ban. His empire-building aliens forbid it, on pain of genocide.

That gave him a setting. Then, what if that empire falls? That gave him the nugget of a plot.

I found it a very effective setting, myself.