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...you might want to check out www.phlebas.com which is all about Ian M Banks' books.
By the way, I love his books too. He is "mean" to his characters, but I think that adds something, rather than takes anything away. Banks usually has much to say, between the lines, as well. Inversions is the most obvious example, but look at the other books too. (But don't look too hard and forget to enjoy :) )
Note: I am not affiliated in any way with that website..Just thought I'd pass it on.

I might have forgotten some details in the stuff Asimov wrote just before he died. These books weren't very memorable -- and didn't have strong continuity with his earlier books.

But you've reminded me of a far better example of benign robot takeover -- Ian Banks's stories about The Culture. Although, I'm not sure Banks thinks of it that way. I suspect he was just doing a cybernetic version of the Marxist Utopia -- a society that's evolved beyond any social institutions based on scarcity (money, government...). I'm not sure he realizes that he's created a world where robots (he calls them "drones") do everything that matters, and humans just putter along, trying not to get in the way.

Then there's Jack Williamson, who came up with a really scary concept: "humanoids" programmed to protect humans from physical harm at all costs. Result: civilization totally devoid of risk, and thus of all activities that humans actually enjoy. Unfortunately, he managed to rather beat the concept to death.

__________

Your mention of machine consciousness and the current chromosome discussion makes me wish I was living in the Culture where all the hard stuff would have been taken care of already. :)

I read TBG before Neverness; fortunately, I read the two a few years apart so that TBG didn't ruin Neverness for me. Both are very good. I haven't finished the series yet; they're hard books to find.

Other SF authors in the same vein, writing literate SF, are the aforementioned Ia in Banks (make sure you consider this website), the well-known Ste phen R. Donaldson and Dan Simmons (in particular his Hyperion series). Iain Banks writes non-genre fiction as Iain M. Banks and is hugely popular in the UK. Donaldson, lambasted and praised for his Unbeliever Chronicles, also wrote The Gap Series, a dark DF space opera based on the Ring Cycle. Simmons writes a lot of horror and other dark fiction.

Another author in the vein is Steven Brust (whose Taltos series is his masterwork), as well as the other members of his writing circle, the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, including Emma Bull.

Another fine but relatively obscure author is the powerful writer George Alec Effinger. Lordy lordy, is this man good. If I'm not mistaken, he's also worked on comix with Neil Gaiman and wrote for the supercool SF cartoon Galaxy Rangers, along with another great author, Tom De Haven.

More old-school authors who wrote very post-modern SF include the amazing Avram Davidson (check out the great Treasury) who wrote primarily short stories, and the odd and great Polish author Stanislaw Lem (whose career began in 1951 and continues to this day). Starting from Lem, you get into the great European (including S. America) "fantastic philosophers" Borges and Calvino. And if you like them, then you're sure to like Pynchon, and so on to David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, who all write SF-tinged fiction.

And the list goes on.

Top 20 Things Iain M. Banks Would Name Hurricane Floyd

20. Hurricane Mild Inconvenience
19. Hurricane Looter-Friendly
18. Hurricane Net Congestion
17. Hurricane Wildly Overrated
16. Hurricane So Much For Subtlety
15. Hurricane This, Too, Shall Pass
14. Hurricane Flying Shrapnel
13. Hurricane We're Not In Kansas Anymore
12. Hurricane Rotating Cow
11. Hurricane Huddling In The Basement
10. Hurricane Hissy Fit
9. Hurricane That's It, We're Moving To Wisconsin
8. Hurricane Doing Unto Others
7. Hurricane The Movie
6. Hurricane Hurried Evacuation
5. Hurricane I Didn't Know My Car Could Swim
4. Hurricane Slashdot Effect
3. Hurricane What I Did On My Summer Vacation
2. Hurricane We're All Going To Die
1. Hurricane Warrior Princess

My personal favourite was GCU Ultimate Ship The Second. There's a full list of Banks' ship names to be found here. They make the naming conventions of ships in most SF series (including the various Treks) seems rather limp and uninspired.

There are a number of things that disturb me about Star Trek, but most of all, I dislike the way the ships are run. If Commander Data can be created, why can't a starship be similarly intelligent and run itself?

I envision multiple-kilometer-long starships, some even maybe hundreds of klicks long, with millions of people on board; sort of like travelling cities. The entire inside of the ship would be something like a holodeck; it could be restructured at will in its entirety. There would only be backup crew on board. Everyone else would be a combination passenger/symbiont/pet.

Maybe the Federation doesn't have this tech yet. Why not skip the next series forward a few hundred years, to give us some new toys to play with, like Roddenberry did with ST:TNG over ST:TOS?

I've shamelessly stolen some of the ideas here from Iain M. Banks' Culture. He's got some of the best ship names ever. A few examples:

1. GSV Ethics Gradient
2. GSV Eschatologist
3. GCU Big Sexy Beast
4. GCU Ultimate Ship The Second

Finally: USS means United States Ship. How about FIV (Federation Interstellar Vehicle) instead?

There are a number of things that disturb me about Star Trek, but most of all, I dislike the way the ships are run. If Commander Data can be created, why can't a starship be similarly intelligent and run itself?

I envision multiple-kilometer-long starships, some even maybe hundreds of klicks long, with millions of people on board; sort of like travelling cities. The entire inside of the ship would be something like a holodeck; it could be restructured at will in its entirety. There would only be backup crew on board. Everyone else would be a combination passenger/symbiont/pet.

Maybe the Federation doesn't have this tech yet. Why not skip the next series forward a few hundred years, to give us some new toys to play with, like Roddenberry did with ST:TNG over ST:TOS?

I've shamelessly stolen some of the ideas here from Iain M. Banks' Culture. He's got some of the best ship names ever. A few examples:

1. GSV Ethics Gradient
2. GSV Eschatologist
3. GCU Big Sexy Beast
4. GCU Ultimate Ship The Second

Finally: USS means United States Ship. How about FIV (Federation Interstellar Vehicle) instead?