10 Weirdest Decisions In Star Trek History

The Federation has been shown countless times that artificial intelligences are capable of achieving sentience, yet they continue to use them as unpaid labour throughout all their space.

In the Voyager episode Author, Author, we saw that Mark I Emergency Medical Holograms like Voyager's Doctor continued to be used as dilithium miners even after the Voyager crew gave strong evidence that they could become self-aware if left online for long periods of time. Additionally, though it was denied, the A500 synths that were forced by the Zhat Vash to attack Mars in Star Trek: Picard could've been capable of sentience eventually, as well as the exocomps from the Next Generation episode The Quality Of Life.

Data's legal battle from The Measure Of A Man should've set some sort of legal precedent of the treatment of synthetic lifeforms, and how exactly they differ from simple robots. It does seem likely though that we'll get to see this explored further in the third season of Picard, given the increase of sentient androids even more advanced than Data.