Well, I was thinking about my last but recurring idea about "AI" actually being strongly based on ...mmm...software emulation of existing biological brain (and partially body) structures. This lead me to thinking about another important for me topic - sapience as something evolutionary-continuos, not just "1 for humans 0 for animals". May be some story (or book!) can be based on this idea: we know 'animal models' (rrr) heavily used today, and even in brain simulation obviously considered simpler to create (smaller size, less connections)

What if ...
Those 'animal-based'software emulations will evolve beyond their biological limits? They still may share some similarities and tendencies with their founding species, yet become nor animals, nor humans, nor 'stupid AI's as they often imagined by not very good authors .... What exactly may prevents such software/computer-based animals from becoming much different from their limited normal world counterparts? If software really more flexible - something interesting may happen (at least on paper/electronic pages)! Will mouse remain mouse if there will be human-like social environment AND ability to change himself/herself much more freely than biologically possible, and/or be changed from outside?

There is still question about personal childhood (how often you read story where AI actually having kind of childhood?), and realizing your world of magic and apparently big possibilities completely at mercy of quite mercyless 'external' corporate worlds? Questions about widespread ideology of exploitation, even if you are supposed to be quite important worker, questions about broken ideologies of society at large, as better seen from slightly shifted/outside position ... fertile ground for talented authors, and I hope good area for internal exploring even for those who can't write it down as story or draw it as comics!

Edit: slightly more thinking. It may be a bit like cyborg but in cyberspace, due to extreme (at least for beginners technology, closer to our times) computational requirements of emulating accurately whole world. So, brain and few directly related subsystems will be emulated at full speed and resolution, may be even with classical speed-up effect possibility, but rest of body, and world around will be a bit of sketch? Yet things like partial empathy/telepathy still may work, likewise for telekinesis, teleportation (you probably lose your conscious/integrity while transfer in progress?).

Cast can be from just one artificial person to not very big group of them - yet without direct and near possibility of downloading everyone into simulation, at least not yet. Having sort of accelerated childhood in cyberspace will be interesting process to try and imagine, I think. And yes, who for the sake of something different those digital beings may not develop much stronger case of ethics, interleaved with their logic? May be some of their structure can be 'developed' by modern 'dumb AI' with goal of making something workable?

I briefly thought some of those beings may have really strange limitations like unability to read digital book because there was no interface for this - but probably you can do some favour to characters and provide at least text-to-speech or text-to-image converters, so they will be able to read digital sandbooks :} (/me tries to imagine being to whom digital compression artifacts are part of life from day one ...)

Basically, story where artificial beings learn about what is life, what is friendship, and why it valuable. And try to save world, of course (because without 'external' world their universe will be way too limited, even socially speaking!)

updated initial post a bit.