Nah, single-task switches and servers are more like electronic plants/fungi than electronic animals.
To be serious: insofar as these robots reorder their subgoals to avoid "pain", PETA might really care one day, at least as much as they care about, say, jellyfish or coral, which are by all measures less sensate. But even under that kind of expanded criterion, an HTTP daemon that just goes on executing to send you a webpage whether its CPU is at 0% or 100% load doesn't qualify.
(On the other hand, one might consider such units as "cells" in a greater being; if that greater being is a system architecture with health-checks and load-balancers and so forth, then it could express goal-orientation, pain avoidance, etc., even though its subcomponents do not.)
To be serious: insofar as these robots reorder their subgoals to avoid "pain", PETA might really care one day, at least as much as they care about, say, jellyfish or coral, which are by all measures less sensate. But even under that kind of expanded criterion, an HTTP daemon that just goes on executing to send you a webpage whether its CPU is at 0% or 100% load doesn't qualify.
(On the other hand, one might consider such units as "cells" in a greater being; if that greater being is a system architecture with health-checks and load-balancers and so forth, then it could express goal-orientation, pain avoidance, etc., even though its subcomponents do not.)