...what are they? or rather, what are the commonly accepted guidelines for when it's appropriate to create them and how they should be treated?
For example, when my character Alex creates Roll, it's because he needed a ship's engineer, but he doesn't just assume she'll do it. He
offers her the job but makes it clear that if she doesn't want it, she's free to go, and that he'll help her get set up somewhere else if she wants
to. Is this, or something similar, common practice with people who regularly create sentient robots (and A.I.s), or is something completely different the norm?
That's pretty much the common practice. After all, we're writing the GOOD GUYS here (well, more or less). As for WHEN... Noah Scott is the most prolific creator of Shelled Infomorphs, and even he only does it when he has a real need. Most do one or two and move on, given that most Fen (baring people like the Colonials) consider A.I.s to be people in their own right.
Sentience and even sapience seem to be an emergent phenomena when 'waving complex things, and is taken as something of an accepted risk. Deliberately cranking them out would be RUDE.
Well... I'll admit that Noah thinks he has a need whenever he builds a self-aware android, but he could have just hired somebody for almost any of the positions he needed to fill. (The sole exception being, oddly enough, Kohran - every flesh-type person with the skill set Noah needed for his weapons engineer works for one of the more powerful national governments. Even he's not rich enough to hire somebody away from that sort of job.) In one case, he had hired somebody to do a job for him before he built an AI for the task - Miyuri replaced Patty as Chief ATC Officer, and Noah had to find something else for Patty to do. (She'll end up in charge of Station Oddessy once it's finished and towed to Mars orbit in early 2015.)
Alex's behaviour towards Roll is the same as Noah's behaviour towards his "angels". So far, only two have chosen to walk away, and he gave each of them enough money to last them for a few months. They're not slaves, they shouldn't be treated as anything less than human, and anyone who says otherwise isn't welcome on his station. (If he ever discovers what we know from what I've posted of Cosmic Party - that Yuu was built as a weapon to be used against him - he'll start to actually hate the people responsible for her creation. But he won't hate Yuu.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
O.k., that's pretty much how I figured it was, but it's good to know all the same.
I'm wondering why Cobalt thinks that the Colonials would regard AI's not to be people, when the major theme of the new series is that they are. Would
anyone be so het up on duplicating the behaviour of fictional characters, when, even in their fictional context, they are shown to be clearly wrong and
immoral?
I'm a fan of Blake's Seven - and regard trying to follow in their path as the karmic equivalent of saying "nothing can go wrong", "I am
invincible" and "it can't get worse" at every opportunity.
OK, maybe I overstated it a bit. The Colonials are the anti-infomorph faction in Fenspace. While they bow to Fen convention and treat infomorphs as people,
they don't have to LIKE it. As such, they avoid trouble by making sure they don't incept infomorphs (given the nature of their fandom and Handwavium,
this fails) and mostly ignoring them where possible. This DOES give the impression that they don't regard A.I.s as people. It also makes them a bit grumpy
when interacting with the other factions. The other factions are polite about this and don't bring attention to any infomorphs around them.