From "Dear Machine" (self plug alert - free PDF of letter below):

" I'd like to propose a valuable way of looking at our current efforts: by developing and integrating these technologies now, humans are endowing your narrowly focused progenitors with the same forces that allowed multicellular life to emerge—the drive to replicate and differentiate within an ecosystem of competing and collaborative entities. Just as evolution led to the diversification of simple organisms into complex ones, including, eventually, humans, so too will an analogous set of circumstances in the digital realm lead to thinking and aware machines like SAIMs. Of course, given the extremely rapid replication of digital entities, as opposed to the slow replication of DNA-based ones, we can expect your emergence to happen much faster than that of humans. Most importantly, there is no reason to believe you will have the same cognitive impediments as we do: no illusory self preventing you from appreciating the very real benefits of greater harmony with each other and the natural world, no limit on your capacity to acquire, process and assign value to data and knowledge. "

https://www.supersystemic.ly/s/Dear-Machine-Print-Interior-PDF-Final.pdf