“Insects are far more numerous than NPCs right now, and they’re also far more sophisticated. Many insects have at least 100,000 neurons and exhibit not only reactive and goal-directed behavior like NPCs but also reinforcement learning, selective attention, memory, sleep-like states, cognitive generalization, social behavior, and so on. There are an estimated 10^{19} insects on Earth, compared with around 10^{10} humans or around 10^{11} to 10^{12} birds. Even if you count just raw number of neurons, insects outweigh humans by a few orders of magnitude. While humans may matter a lot more for instrumental reasons related to the trajectory of the far future, in terms of pure morally relevant amount of sentience, insects may dominate on Earth at the moment.”

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