Iain M. Bank's Culture novels are rife with conscious ships, characters in their own right. I've read a few but generally can't recall books as well as I can recall films, so I don't know if the ship's consciousness ever inhabited a human-like android or not.
Reminds me that I must read some of them again.
I think I've read all of Banks'
Culture novels. Highly recommended.
In the universe of the Culture, the entire human(ish) society is essentially run by Minds, which are AIs housed either in enormous reconfigurable spaceships or enormous artificial space-based habitats in orbit around star. The Minds can create Avatars that look like humans, and they can also control many semi-autonomous drones. Apart from the Minds, there are also independent drones, which are usually floating robots about the size of a suitcase, or smaller. The independent drones have approximately human-level intelligence. The Minds exist, at least in part, in some of the "hidden" dimensions of spacetime, so although they appear roughly as spheres a couple of metres across, internally they are complex far beyond human understanding.
Probably the thing that is most striking about the Culture is that it is a post-scarcity society, which means that essentially the civilisation has sufficient control over access to resources to be able to produce just about anything that is desired. Currency is therefore superfluous. The human inhabitants of the Culture do not need to work, and most of them do not. Mostly, the humans spend their time enjoying themselves.
Humans in the Culture tend to be augmented in various ways, such as having computer-interface implants and almost without exception drug glands that they can use to control and enhance normal bodily functions. Operations to alter the body are routine, so people can change sex if they want to, or even change bodies to something quite different, or modify their bodies (for example to have extra limbs or other organs).
The novels tend to revolve around some kind of "Special Circumstances" operation, often involving the Culture coming into contact with less advanced civilisations but occasionally also having to deal with near-equivalent level civilisations that pose a threat of one kind or another. There are also various intrigues involving Minds with eccentric goals of their own. The action usually revolves around one or a few human characters who are recruited for special tasks by the Minds.
If you like space opera on the largest scales, the Culture novels are an excellent read.
