Why not use drone fighters?

Why does the Federation not use a mass of drone fighters?

It would be sensible, and holographic control offers a technical route, but Starfleet's artificial-intelligence rights questions complicate the idea.

Drone fighters would be a sensible way to reduce pilot losses, and comparable craft appear elsewhere in the franchise. An Emergency Medical Hologram-style program could provide fighter-control intelligence. The legal and ethical difficulty is that both Data and holographic beings raise questions about whether apparently expendable software is actually a rights-bearing person.