You are waiting for more borg and romulans? Are you interested in a new enemy of the federation to appear or have another re-encounter like the cardassians?
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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How about something like The Culture?
Highly advanced multi-species civilization ruled by benevolent AIs?
I have a nagging feeling that something like it should have appeared in Trek at some point.
Ship the size of a continent slips out of the skein alongside a Federation starship and immediately runs a scan that siphons up all the art and science records onboard.
"Science officer, wtf?"
"Hey there! We are The Culture! We've been partying for the last few hundred cycles, and this month has been particularly wild. Everybody thinks y'all seem cool. Wanna get fucked up, go lava surfing, and chat about life? Just park that thing anywhere."
I'd love to watch that one.
This is interesting, even without the benevolent AI, though that could be interesting as well. But what happens when The Federation runs into essentially another Federation? Do they combine and double their knowledge and territory or do they clash over differing ideals? There's no way humans were the first species to say "hey, let's work together," but if they ran into, say, space capitalists, we could wind up being the USSR of a new galactic Cold War.
This is another thought experiment that Kirsten Beyer took on in her Voyager Full Circle sequence in the Relaunch Treklit novelverse.
There were a lot of questions about whether their ethics were in fact shared or parallel with that of the Federation as well as whether they really were who they claimed to be on the surface.
Another Relaunch Treklit exploration involved a very different Breen society than Discovered unveiled. Instead of a single species, Breen turned out to be a multiplicity of species with different environmental requirements who all spent all their lives in environmental suits other than in their own homes. In the Relaunch universe, the Breen achieved species, race and gender equality by completely hiding their physiology and masking their voices.
I mean, The Culture is just The Federation if it actually followed through on post-scarcity utopianism.
Nor really.
The Feds still have meatbags making decisions.
The Culture humanoids are "lucky" enough to have benevolent AIs who spoil them like pets.
Less benevolent AI rule might look like Saberhagen's Berserkers, or Battlestar Galactica's Cylons.
I know you didn't ask, but:
As weird as it sounds, I don't think the Borg are ruled by AI. If they were, they'd be a lot scarier than they already are. Cyborg meat brains, e.g. the Borg Queen, are still in charge of making stupid decisions.
The Minds of the culture are people, with the same rights as any other inhabitant. Even the ones unwilling or unsuitable to coordinate the systems of a ship or orbital.
By contrast, both Data and the Doctor had to argue for their personhood, to convince the Federation that they should have rights, and their utility played a role in that decision.
The Federation talk a big game about fair treatment for all sentient beings, but they sure are willing to deny rights to those they don't like, and they are meat supremacists.
Sentient AIs seem to be a lot less common and less powerful computationally in Fed space than in the Culture.
Lore/Data/Lal, Moriarty, the Doctor and that's pretty much it.
V'Ger is earlier, but was overclocked by unknown alien technology, and therefore not replicable by the Feds.
Although a starship computer of the TNG era, i.e. the latter third of the 24th Century, has enough computing power to create a sentient AI, Moriarty, by what is essentially a mistake in Data's vibe coding, there seems to be some kind of brake to keep starship computers from becoming sentient themselves.
Culture AIs come in a huge range of capabilities from GSV commanding Minds to drones like Mawhrin-Skel with about the same level of intelligence as the biological citizens, to a sentient survival suit.
If you read closely, although the meatbag characters largely take center stage, it's the GSV Minds who directly control the vast majority of resources, come to consensus among themselves on strategy, or go loose cannon, or sulk in a corner, and everyone else is literally just along for the ride.
Are they really rare, or are we seeing a universe shaped by and through the eyes of a civilization predisposed to deny and destroy them? Apart from the Doctor and Moriarty, how many others were simply shut off? How many beings like the exocomps were wiped when they "malfunctioned"? How many sentient computers are locked away in the Daystrom Institute, never to see the light of day?