Comment by jeremyjh

I've always believed the Jihad was mostly about world building - defining a different vision for a how a future civilization could look than most sci-fi of that era was considering, and then exploring consequences of it throughout the epic. Somewhat akin to Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, but maybe even more similar to Tolkien.

I think it was also motivated by a desire to solve a number of problems with sci-fi that explores the far future and realistically considers the evolving role of machine intelligence. Frankly, a lot of those futures are not interesting for human story-telling because the humans are no longer making the important decisions and aren't the agents of change. Different authors have dealt with this problem in different ways.

Banks acknowledged that the Minds would be making most of the most important decisions, but carved out niches where humans (rather inexplicably) still held some advantages - e.g. in Special Circumstances. Much of it feels honest - humans in the Culture are mostly hedons who have everything provided for them by machines, everything is wonderful, and some people really struggle to find meaning. Ultimately though I don't find it credible at all. He doesn't see (so the Minds don't see) the ethical problems with his imperialist hegemony. He doesn't know about the alignment problem so there is no explanation of how it is dealt with, etc.

Vinge quite famously pointed out that you can't write sci-fi about super-intelligence because you have no idea what a super-intelligence would do; this is where many essential ideas of the singularity came from or were popularized. He dealt with it in one series by creating the zones of thought - godlike superintelligence and many technologies can only exist in the High Beyond or Transcend - far from the galactic plane. The further you get from the galactic center the faster computation can happen (including human thought). So you include elements of that in the story, but the story is set in zones where humans have to do pretty much all the decision making while dealing with threats posed by superintelligence. In Marooned in Realtime he dealt with it by disappearing the civilization without explanation (from the perspective of the characters).

Egan dealt with it - in Diaspora - by creating machine intelligence that is grown exactly the same way as human intelligence is - basically the next stage of human evolution. Those people retain most human characteristics (of personality, character, love, friendship) but still have incredible powers of reasoning and scientific exploration. He tells Vinge to hold his beer and follows those threads where he thought they might lead.