How would Contact or SC make your typical fantasy setting denizens want to adopt Culture values like abandoning monarchy, banning slavery, etc? Especially in a setting where you have superhuman warriors and mages and gods with actual powers?
Reading Diaspora by Greg Egan, I can't help but wonder about those Culture folks who live in VR, abandoning the real world entirely. It's a shame Banks never really wrote a book about them.
I can imagine one Orbital whose citizens are all just people who prefer living in virtual worlds because they have a lot more freedom in it. Like the Citizens in Diaspora said, you can go really weird in VR because you're not limited to real world physics. And if you go full digital, you can make it so a day in the real is equal to a year in vr.
Random seed, pattern recognition, using the library of human knowledge as its training data... I wonder if Greg Egan based it off neural networks.
The orphan is essentially Artificial Intelligence, not an uploaded human mind. Though in Greg Egan's stories, there's not much of a difference.
The new narrative seems to be that AI isn't gonna take your jobs, AI can never be superintelligent, AI will remain a tool forever, etc.
Compare that to a few years ago when they kept saying superintelligence is within reach.