One of the genuine innovations of the Dune novel is the idea that by forbidding all thinking machines, the Empire of Humanity has had to build people of tremendous skill in order to do the jobs that machines used to. Mentats, Bene Gesserit, Suk doctors, and ultimately the Kwisatz Haderach were the result of humans needing to imbue individuals with incredible knowledge and skill to overcome the anti-AI handicap.
FOR SOME REASON, lately I am thinking a lot about the mirror case.
I've never seen a sci-fi story about the opposite situation - a society where AIs can be depended on to do everything, so humans have no need to develop any particular skill. I'm sure someone has done this already, I just haven't come across it.
Like, even in Star Trek, AIs have incredible ability to construct content and real actual things that people need, but somehow the people in the shows are always more skilled and competent than people today are.
Like in the TNG episode "The Neutral Zone", people from our era are portrayed as at best benign nuisances compared to the hyper-competent crew of the Enterprise. In effect, they are human history exhibits.
Now there is a case to be made that the skills of people from our era just aren't transferrable. In a post-scarcity society, who needs a businessman? What can a 20th Century homemaker bring to a world that eats from replicators?
I think maybe quite a lot, once the tech gap gets covered.
DS9 was interesting with how it handled holosuites. Throughout all of Trek so far, holodecks and holosuites have been portrayed as able to construct absolutely believable virtual worlds entirely by vague instructions to a machine. It takes absolutely no expertise to create the setting.
But in DS9, we start to see the mindset that making things GOOD requires non-machine expertise. When Jake Sisko's writing career is mentioned to Quark, he immediately tries to tie it to the holo industry.
What does being fed a diet (in terms of cuisine and culture) of endless bowls of slightly varied gray oatmeal do to a society?
What does having every need met with minimal effort do to the skill levels in that society?
What does never being able to make a career out of making or building or creating because a machine can always do it "more efficiently" do to a people who are never allowed the time to get bored?
I stopped reading Banks after "Player of Games," (not because I disliked the books, but they did drain me a bit) but even in that world, while it seems that many background humans in the culture do like lives of hedonistic and unchallenged bliss, plenty of main characters have excellent skills and talent compared to people in our world.
But why? What pushes them?
Maybe later books I haven't read get into it.
Anyway, it does seem like though sci-fi writers love to imagine a world with powerful AIs solving people's problems for them, very few writers want to tackle the possibility that this could lead to people being capable of less than we are now.
It seems that the fantasy of human competence improving at least linearly with time is too appealing for many writers to challenge.
@NinjianaJon Protagonists of the culture tend to be bored (or occasionally disillusioned) with the life of ease the culture offers, and are generally outliers, especially when picked up by SC.
That said, if people don't have anything to do, and doing nothing isn't a luxury, people find things to fill their time. They do weird and interesting stuff for hobbies and push themselves because they can. And some aliens think it's weird, but the culture mostly thinks of it as' what humans do'
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