AI's Ultimate Future - Today's Thinking

So firstly I started thinking about the future in around 2008 when I was finally done mastering the technology I'd been building with for a decade or so. I started reading science fiction again, and joined the Long Now. By 2010 I was mostly done with enterprise software and jumped into open source and cloud. Right now, I'd say that I get that - mastered it in a different way - not so much as a practitioner. So I'm starting to look past my immediate horizon again. 

I'm thinking that programmers are their own worst enemies, and that eventually their nasty habit of trying to make more money with tech they themselves understand will create some oligopolies, and black hats will accelerate that process. Looking forward, relevant software and hardware IT will become reduced to a smaller, more ubiquitous, more capable, more secure and more dominant set. So with AI coming along that is inevitable too. We all call this 'interoperability' and 'best practices'. Nobody wants to run afoul of these guiding principles except perhaps retro indy game designers.

All that said, there is a finite universe of applications that humans themselves will care about, as Musk says, in service of the human cortex and limbic systems. 

Right now, for me the most complete and perhaps most compelling vision is that of the late Iain M Banks' Culture. He has conceptualized and illustrated a post-scarcity galaxy in which humans and other alien species are governed and protected by massively powerful machine-based AIs with goofy names. That to me sounds like the endgame because it presents us with a compelling dramatic rendition of both planet sized catastrophes and the death by natural causes of entire civilizations. He calls the latter 'sublimation'. Essentially, nobody wants to live forever, and after you've been a hero and a villian, a man and a woman and a fish and a bird and a good angel and an evil demon and lived for 500 years and so has everyone in your species, you get bored with life. You sublimate and hang a sign on your planet that says gone fishin', do not disturb. You tell the master AIs to make you corner of the galaxy a no-fly zone and it's enforced. 

On the generative side of this, though unrelated is a series called the Bobiverse, which over several volumes tracks the person of Bob, a future computer scientist who becomes the first true cyborg, embedded in a space station, eventually clones himself and thus is the prototype for the Culture Ships, say 1000 years ahead of them. 

So I kick it off with Iain Banks and Dennis E Taylor. Where do your AI ideas go?