Anyone that wants this future for humanity, wants to be a pet, simple as that.
I get how it can be dystopian to people who live for competition or just need to feel useful but we need to adapt if AI is going to be better than us at any jobs to feel fulfilled with recreation and hobbies. It's doable, retirees have to face this situation with a bunch of additional stress they don't have in the Culture
Culture Minds have far more respect for individual self-determination than any human power structure that has ever existed. I don't weep at all for the 1% of humans who lose the ability to dominate the lives of other humans. The other 99% of humans lose nothing and gain enormous freedom.
Let's assume you have everything in the Culture except the ASIs. So you have full blown Drexlerian nanotechnology, access to all the technology more or less possible out to the limits of physical law. Energy is functionally infinite, and if you want basically anything to be produced you simply order it from the AI equivalent of ChatGPT today and it is directly manufactured from base chemical feedstocks and delivered to you by a simple automaton. Food, clothes, furniture, any sort of electronics. Homes are extremely plentiful and similarly require ~ no effort to obtain, since they are just snapped together from atomically perfect panels. When you're done with something, it gets recycled back to feedstocks to be made into something else.
Okay. Now what? You're free to love who you like, befriend who you like. But nothing you do matters really for anyone else beyond sentimental value, since nothing you do effects whether they live or die (you're all functionally immortal after all, plausibly you can backup your consciousness and get resleeved if something truly catastrophic was to happen to you). There's no scarcity, no need to horde things, you play games and amuse yourself in whatever little hobbies delight you, and you socialize with those who you care to.
What exactly is the grand thing that you think people are going to be doing in that scenario that they can't do in the Culture?
It seems apparent that for the overwhelmingly enormous majority of people the Culture is identical to the case where there are no Minds, because to whatever extent some tiny portion of humans needs to make some sort of major decisions in a post-scarcity world with no Minds, 99.9999+% of people will not be among them. We see mostly people interacting with Special Circumstances (a tiny fraction of the overall population) and most of those who live on GSVs etc managed by Minds in SC themselves are also just going about their days and not involved with whatever machinations the Minds have going on.
Like, what is the problem that ASI really introduces here for regular people? And in a world where you are indeed free to leave the Culture (as we've seen) if you really want to, and there's plenty of variety in how smaller groups in the Culture live their lives, what exactly is missing? There is no oppression, no brutality, no war, disease, famine, poverty, or want and you're free to do as you like except kill people without their consent and/or otherwise hurt others. What more freedom do you really want?
I understand the first one but that's something people need to get over, it's already a part of being old or having a handicap that makes you unemployable, I think future generations will grow up without equating hard work with ethics
All of the big decisions are made by the Minds, and every time a human thinks they’re doing something of their own accord, it is implied (or explicitly stated) that they’re being manipulated by a Mind.
Several of the novels state this outright, including mentioning that Marain, the language of the culture, was explicitly designed to “guide” the thoughts of its human speakers in the “right way” as decided by the Minds that worked on its design. Handcuffs for the human mind so integrated that nobody even realises they’re shackled.
The humans aren’t prisoners, they’re pets allowed to roam “outside”, but they’re not the agents of their future in any real sense.
PS: Horrific betrayal by a highly trusted character in a position of father-like authority is a running theme in Banks’ works. The more utopian and idealistic the scenario, the greater the horror the reader can experience when that is shattered by the realisation that it was all a manipulation. The Wasp Factory, one of his earlier works, makes this the most explicit with the betrayal of the protagonist’s sexual identity by their own father, but since that book Banks has learned to make this theme less explicit and more implicit, waiting for the reader to discover it on their own and have the “Oh. Ohhhh! Oh God.” moment. Clearly many people missed it in the later Culture books…
I think you're overstating this. Especially considering that Marain is spoken both by humans and minds. In Banks' own words:
> Marain is a synthetic language created towards the very beginning of the Culture with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable - a language, in short, that would appeal to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers alike.
There are other books too where people leave the culture (including entire worlds) and do whatever. Banks is careful to write very meaningful agency into the culture to make it a utopia rather than some paternalistic pet thing.
The only case where that kind of doesn't apply is special circumstances and the interesting times gang, which are heavily controversial within the culture and are explicitly pointed out as solutions that exist outside the normal moral fabric of society.
The direct analogy is a pet that ran away into the forest.
This is the “exception that proves the rule”.