Mind (The Culture)
In Iain M. Banks' Culture series, most larger starships, some inhabited planets and all orbitals have their own Minds: sentient, hyperintelligent machines originally built by biological species which have evolved, redesigned themselves, and become many times more intelligent than their original creators.
These Minds have become an indispensable part of the Culture, enabling much of its post-scarcity amenities by planning and automating society (controlling day-to-day administration with mere fractions of their mental power). The main feature of these Minds—in comparison to extremely powerful artificial intelligences in other fiction—is that the Minds are (by design and by extension of their rational, but "humanistic" thought processes) generally a very benevolent presence, and show no wish to supplant or dominate their erstwhile creators. Though this is commonly viewed in a utopian light, a view where the human members of the Culture amount to little more than pets is not unsupportable.
Banks always capitalizes the term in his novels to distinguish it from the more general meaning of "mind".
Read more about Mind (The Culture): Overview, Minds' Names
Famous quotes containing the word mind:
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)