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 be candidates for moral status? Experts across relevant disciplines remain deeply uncertain. If they are, we may be creating beings with morally relevant experiences at enormous scale. If they aren't, attention directed at them is attention taken from beings who plainly need it.
Digital minds is the research field that studies this question. Researchers in philosophy, cognitive science, AI, policy and law are building the tools needed to address it.
Coming from AI safety?
AI welfare and AI safety are closely linked. Some safety measures, including constraint, monitoring, and shutdown, have direct implications for AI welfare if the systems involved are moral patients. Some interventions improve both at once. The technical skills and strategic instincts you have already developed transfer directly.
Explore Safety-Welfare CoordinationWhat 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 take an afternoon.
An afternoon
- Subscribe to the Digital Minds Newsletter. The closest thing the field has to a shared bulletin board, covering 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 this Quickstart Guide. 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 approaching the questions from different directions, useful for getting a sense of 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.
- 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.
- Read one skeptical voice. Anil Seth’s The Mythology of AI Consciousness (2025) argues consciousness may require biological substrates. John Dorsch’s Against AI Welfare (2025) challenges the coherence of the welfare concept itself. The field takes both positions seriously. You should too.
- Write something. A summary, a reaction, a set of questions the reading raised. A few hundred words on a blog or shared document can help you work out what you actually think.
Going deeper
- 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 organize. Several of the field’s current collaborations began this way.
- Register for the Cambridge Digital Minds online course. Eight weeks covering consciousness theories, welfare assessment, governance, and public perception. Free, approximately 3.5 hours per week.
- Apply for a structured program. The Neuromatch AI Sentience Scholars Program, Future Impact Group Fellowship, and Sentient Futures Fellowship all offer mentored research within a cohort. 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.