Destination, Void by Frank Herbert (1981, Hardcover)

A reasonable example of one of his lesser works. The dialog is heavy, the characters poorly done, they spend a lot of time philosophizing and doing mechanical chores. Still worth going through once if you like Herbert.

***Plot Spoilers below***

A handful of clones (disposable, legally not persons) are raised from, er, not birth, decanting, for the sole purpose of piloting a starship to Tau Ceti. They have been kept away from direct contact with all other humanity, raised to have a total dedication to this task. They have no way of knowing that their mission is fake, their ship flawed by design.

Their ship is too demanding to be run by hand, too complicated for any normal machine. Their ship control systems start falling apart early in the mission. This is intended to force them to experiment with creating artifical intelligences to run the ship. Prior experience (that they don't know about) back on Earth have shown that building A.I.s is fantastically dangerous when it works, that a non-human mind has non-human abilities.

It is decided to move all future experiments not just off-planet, but out to the edge of the solar system, preferably moving away from Earth at a good fraction of C just in case. Yes, it really is that dangerous. They are making things like gods and no one knows how to handle them.

The ship is spying on them, recording their every move. If they can't come up with an AI they will die out in the cold between the stars. If they get something interesting their work will be downloaded and the ship remotely detonated to destroy whatever awful thing they may have made. Their work and results will then be safely studied back on Earth.

They don't know that they are the fifth ship in the test series, Early results were interesting. Even as they fight and struggle to survive and fulfill their mission, the clones for test #6 are being decanted for the next run...