I once went to a talk by Ian Banks, he said the key thing about his Sci-Fi future is that a super powerful AI would be benevolent.
The Culture is happens when an AI actually likes humans and easily surpasses them. It's quite unique, I think, in most sci fi. In Star Trek, for example, the AI is neutral, a tool.
Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
I do wish we had less of the "AI kills everyone or is just evil" trope. It's done to death and frankly doesn't make much sense to me. The Minds in The Culture seem to me a much more reasonable conclusion of how a superintelligent AI would react to biological beings - that is, benevolent at worst.
> Are there cases of jealousy in the AI towards humans? Does an AI want to be a human?
I don't recall anything along these lines. The Minds and Drones are perfectly sentient, with "emotions" and desires and all that fun stuff, plus the benefits of being objectively better than us in almost every conceivable way. It wouldn't make much sense for them to pine to be human(oid.) I wonder if there's a word for this sort of "human idolization" in scifi - that being human is just the epitome of being.