Absolutely there can (and probably should) be more spotlight on the exact nature of the automation. Which should include expert systems in the software and probably droids to handle assorted tasks. Since this a game about people, you want the rules to maintain the primacy of people (unless you are intentionally doing something like The Culture as a setting).
Mindjammer lets you have starships as PCs, fully sentient robots, and the like. But they maintain human relevance by giving them long lifespans and having mostly benevolent AI overlords (like in the Culture). But in Charted Space, they instead just make it such that sentient machines aren't a thing, either because it's just that hard or because people are refusing/prevented from building it.
Personally, I think the expert systems/Agents and the Virtual Crew are overly complicated, too expensive, and underutilized. I just think that the task check limits on such artificial intellects should be interpreted stringently as restrictions on their creativity and flexibility. So, as swordtart says, you need those creative sophonts.
I have a robot right now. It's only a roomba, but it is a robot. We have industrial robots and self-crashing cars. And we have drones that fly themselves and just have people watching to make decisions. All right now. So, barring a Butlerian Jihad, we should reasonably expect to have those in the game. And they shouldn't be cripplingly expensive.
But I want them limited, because I like my games to be about people and I prefer to avoid the Stars Ward droid slave issue
So there are lots of robots (and drones for the ship's computer), but it's very clear they are not people (nor are they secretly actually people and biological people pretend that they aren't)..
If I had a player who really wanted to play a sentient robot like Data, I'd just run a Culture type setting that has that kind of thing as normal. Because, honestly, I'm not interested in running a pinocchio story arc as DM
