This seems so... obvious, that I'm surprised this potential isn't talked about more. Our own species probably isn't all that far away from generating some variety of machine consciousness. I'd say give it a few hundred years at most.

Heck, this begs the question of why the hell would an intelligent alien species even send their meat bags into space, when they can just upload their consciousness into a machine and have it do their bidding, without any of the limitations of biological systems.