“In the long run it may be that most of the sentience in the galaxy will be digital, because computers run much faster than biological brains and can exist in greater numbers, since they don’t require such sensitive planetary conditions to support biology. Future civilizations may employ immense numbers of reinforcement-learning robots, goal-directed optimization processes, and other computational systems where we can see traces of things that remind us of sentience. Finding ways to develop more humane approaches to computation will be an important task for our descendants, especially if they colonize space.”

— Brian Tomasik, This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral (Dylan Matthews, Vox, April 23, 2014)