@Cosmacelf ...type...?
um, how about a small group of humans linked, or offloading complex ideas and thoughts to distributedloosely coupled processors to be crunched and answers given back
what if you could think at petaflop speed? or faster....
(for reference the MINDS in Iain Banks "culture" "think and live" ~3,170 years every second of our time effectively)
when it comes to sentience, humans are most likely at the rock bottom of the first rung of the ladder, and its weirder than we can imagine
SF has "thought" about this for decades (See "A Fire upon the Deep" and the Tines race, groups of 4-8 individuals sharing a common conciousness)
etc. using ultrasonics
en.wikipedia.org