Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

I was born two hundred and twenty years ago, I have lived for a hundred and ten of them, and physically I’m about thirty.”

We won the battles for the acknowledgment of machine sentience, but by all accounts the issue was fudged after that. Now people are saying, yes, they’re sentient, but it’s only human sentience that counts. Plus, people never need too much of an excuse to see other species as inferior.”

The Culture believes profoundly in machine sentience, so it thinks everybody ought to, but I think it also believes every civilization should be run by its machines. Fewer people want that.

“An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organized differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely grained device of equivalent power — or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness — a similar distinction?