A Beginner’s Guide
to Digital Minds
A guide for newcomers to the field of AI consciousness, AI welfare, and digital minds research.
Could some AI systems have minds that matter morally? Experts across relevant disciplines remain deeply uncertain. Without better tools for answering the question, we risk creating beings with morally relevant experiences at enormous scale without recognising it, or directing moral attention toward systems that warrant none, at the expense of beings who plainly do.
Digital minds is the research field working to reduce this uncertainty. It studies what these systems are, whether they could matter morally, and how we should treat, govern, and coexist with them.
What You Can Do This Week
You do not need to commit to a career change to engage with digital minds. Some of the most useful starting points only take an afternoon.
An afternoon
- Subscribe to the Digital Minds Newsletter. The closest thing the field has to a shared bulletin board. New research, events, jobs, and policy, as they happen.
- Read the 80,000 Hours profile on the moral status of digital minds. A short, accessible introduction to the field’s central questions and where the uncertainty sits.
- Browse the Quickstart Guide by Avi Parrack and Štěpán Los. A curated reading list with options ranging from a single paper to a full syllabus.
- Watch an episode of Exploring Machine Consciousness (PRISM), Our Lives With Bots, or Conspicuous Cognition. Three channels, three different angles. Useful for hearing how people in the field actually talk.
A weekend
- Read Bradford Saad and Andreas Mogensen’s Digital Minds I (2026). The most comprehensive academic introduction available, covering the central philosophical and cognitive science questions without assuming prior expertise in either.
- Read Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society (Bostrom and Shulman, 2023). A wide-ranging map of the ethical and governance questions digital minds raise. One of the most comprehensive single documents in the field, and a good way to see the whole landscape at once.
- Listen to recordings from the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy lecture series. Working philosophers presenting and arguing about AI consciousness and moral status. Watching several reveals how much disagreement there is among people who take the questions seriously.
- Listen to Robert Long on the 80,000 Hours Podcast. A wide-ranging conversation with one of the researchers at the centre of the field, covering AI consciousness, what AI welfare actually involves, and how to act under deep uncertainty. A good way to hear how someone working on this full-time reasons through the open questions.
- Read some different perspectives. Anil Seth’s The Mythology of Conscious AI (2026) argues that consciousness is more likely a property of living systems than of computation. Is AI Conscious? A Primer on the Myths and Confusions Driving the Debate overviews the prominent cases for and against AI consciousness without taking sides.
- Write something. A summary, a reaction, a set of questions the reading raised. A few hundred words on a blog, a shared document, or the EA Forum can help you develop your own perspective.
Going deeper
- Register for the Cambridge Digital Minds online course. Eight weeks covering consciousness theories, welfare assessment, governance, and public perception.
- Start or join a reading group. If your department or institution does not have one, propose it. A handful of people meeting every two weeks to work through a paper is one of the lowest-cost, highest-value things you can organise. Several of the field’s current collaborations began this way.
- Apply for a structured program. The Neuromatch AI Sentience Scholars Program, Future Impact Group Fellowship, and Sentient Futures Fellowship offer mentored research within a cohort; MATS and the Kairos Generator Residency are broader AI-safety programmes that take digital-minds projects too. Several are competitive to get into. See Events & Opportunities for the full list.
- Attend a conference or workshop. The Sentient Futures conferences have become a convening point for the digital minds community, with many sessions available online for those who cannot attend in person. Showing up to one likely puts you in the room with people whose work you have been reading.
Coming from AI safety?
AI safety and AI welfare interact in important ways, and we think the two fields should work more closely together to find co-beneficial strategies.
Many of the strongest cases for working on AI safety are directly relevant to AI welfare. The technical projects that let us understand AI systems, align their goals, and work with them cooperatively are projects that make outcomes better for humans and, on plausible accounts, for the systems themselves.
Explore Safety-Welfare Coordination