In computer science, digital sentience is a concept that digital computers could someday be capable of indepedent thought. Digital sentience, if it ever comes to exist, will be a form of strong artificial intelligence. One generally accepted criterion for sentience is self-awareness.

Digital Sentience has so far been an elusive goal, and a vague and poorly understood one at that. Since the 1950s, computer scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and science fiction authors have debated the meaning, possibilities and the question of what would constitute digital sentience. The Turing test is a proposal for identifying machine "intelligence" by testing a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation. The Chinese room argument is an attempt to debunk the validity of the Turing Test.

Star Trek's Data is a a fictional embodiment of digital sentience, as are many of the robots in Isaac Asimov's Robot Series.