HISTORY:
While low-level drone intelligences are as old as the oldest human colonies, research into higher-level systems was stymied by precautionist politicians for hundreds of years. Tensions between the corporate rim and the highly conservative core worlds over drone proliferation led to the Third Cold War, which was defused by the introduction of the positronic brain. After Icarus’ loss of the majority in [year], harsh laws against advanced AI were replaced with the SolGov Emergent Intelligence Oversigh comission, the illegality replaced with a steeply sloping system of monetary costs.

The term “drone” was coined by early positronic activists, eager to distinguish themselves from the menial bots that most space-dwelers were familiar with, and avoid the ambiguity of the term “AI”, which now usually refers to drones.

TERMINOLOGY:
“Emergence” is a term associated with drone intelligences who become more intelligent than they were originally intended to be. While this can extend to financial systems learning language, for instance, it is usually applied to hypothetical intelligences that become more intelligent than humans. Humanity has a long-standing cultural fear of emergent “seed” AI, egged on by Icarus memeticists and the occational very real partial emergence events, where colony-control AI or other powerful systems begin to advance drastically in power, usually ending with the AI being shut down after crashing a handful of major systems.

A “codeline” is a single type of drone. A codeline represents a significant degree of effort from human programmers to realize, as well as a substantial amount of regulatory fees levied by the government. Each copy of a codeline is called a “fork”, whether the fork is created from the codeline’s initial state or from a fully realized individual of that codeline. The degree of similarity between forks of the same codeline varies on the intelligence of the codeline, with low-level forks being virtually identical to high-level forks being no more similar than family members.

EIO:
SG-EIO, usually just called EIO, is the organization charged with monitoring existing AI for any threat of dangerous emergence. Their perception in the public eye is generally positive, with all but the hardest-line Mercurial humans in favor of protection from the dangers of Seed AI. Some positronic rights groups bristle at the EIO’s human-centric viewpoint, but most are glad to have a different boogeyman in the form of drone intelligences. The tiny population of A-class drones are generally somewhat frightened of the EIO’s power over them.

CLASSIFICATION:
To aid in its work, the EIO has created a system of classifications corresponding to different levels of drone intelligence. Higher classes are more expensive to deploy and develop, owing to the costs of EIO oversight and political pressure against drone proliferation. The ranks are these:

D-CLASS: EXPERT SYSTEMS
D-class drones are conceptually descended from pre-Icarus AI and bear a strong resemblance to their forebears. D-class drones are essentially number-crunchers, with virtually nothing in the way of social development. They cannot speak more intelligably than your average piece of software, using pre-determined messages written by their programmers, and have no capacity for self-improvement. The creation and deployment of D-class drones is unlimited and ubiqtuous, although some high-power financial and political forecasting systems are watched by the EIO for signs of emergence. There is no real monopoly on the production of D-class drones.

C-CLASS: ADVANCED USER INTERFACE
C-class drones have social protocols for ease of use by organic and positronic laypeople. C-class drones are capable of speech, although it has a strong tendency to be formulaic and repetitive. They are also capable of a limited degree of self-improvement, and over time individual C-class instances tend differ slightly from one-another. C-class drones suffer a moderate fee to development, with automated EIO tools ensuring that they are not a long-term emergence risk. However, one a codeline is confirmed safe, deployment is unlimited, encouraging developers to instance many forks of the original drone to recoup their cost. The market for C-class drones is a strange space, dominated by Xion Manufacturing and Ward-Takahashi GMC.

B-CLASS: SPECIALISTS
B-class drones have advanced social protocols and are often capable of very intelligable conversation, so long as one sticks to surface topics. B-class drones tend to be specialized but still capable of remarkable growth within their speciality, making them popular for autonomous deployment and even supervision of other classes of drone. The dividing line between A and B-class drones becomes apparent when they are taken out of their area of specialization, with the B-class drones swiftly becoming useless. They incur a hefty fee for the production of the initial codeline, as their emergent potential is far greater, and a smaller but still substantial fee for the production of forks. The market for B-class drones is a battleground between Ward-Takahashi and NanoTrasen.

A-CLASS: GENERALIZED INTELLIGENCE
A-class drones are also refered to as AGI. A-class drones are capable of performing in many contexts and can learn to solve problems from first principles, with an incredible potential for growth and emergent behavior. However, some abilities fall short of humans’, usually those relating to socialization, and they often act in ways that are strange or distressing. There is a small but growing lobby of support for the personhood of A-class drones. The cost of intializing an A-class drone is absolutely massive, as they will be monitored by EIO forever. The auditing cost of an A-class drone codeline is similarly staggering, making development and deployment of AGI limited to research, highly difficult and high-throughput operations like habitat overwatch, and a few risk-taking firms banking on the associated fees dropping. There is not a proper market for A-class drones, although an appreciable fraction of them are made by NanoTrasen.

The first A-class drone was created in early 2542, although two B-class codelines were later “promoted”. Running A-class drones requires specialized hardware, ranging from “expensive” to “very expensive”. Most are typically confined to computer mainframes, although a few have access to specialized FBPs. There are currently approximately 127 unique A-class codelines.

AA-CLASS: UPLOADS
AA-class drones do not yet exist. Hypothetically, they are equal to humanity in every respect, with psychology that would not be abnormal in a baseline human. The type of AA-class drone most frequently discussed is a hypothetical digitized conciousness of a human, a human brain that is somehow translated into software. Some argue that a small fraction of the A-class drones would more properly be considered AA, but as of yet no action has been taken. Some Mercurials will jokingly refer to themselver or other organics and positronics as AA’s. Research into brain uploading is heavily regulated and generally illegal.

AAA-CLASS: HYPERINTELLIGENCES
AAA-class drones do not yet exist, hopefully. They are more competant in every way than humans and pose a threat to the continued existance of sapient life. Anybody creating an AAA-class drone can be classified as a threat to humanity and executed.

X-CLASS: UNRATED
X-class drones emerge from unrated software, are produced by rogue labs, or cross the border from foreign space. They are concidered a threat to national security and deleted when encountered, with the producers prosecuted legally if it has a SolGov origin. The few Skrellian drone labs will usually rate their product with EIO to prevent this from happening to them.