“Introducing A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Minds” by Lucius Caviola, Mitch Alexander, Will Millership

We’ve launched A Beginner's Guide to Digital Minds (digitalminds.guide), a website for people who want an introduction to AI consciousness, AI welfare, and the broader implications of the possibility that AI systems could matter morally. The guide provides an overview of the questions motivating digital minds research, including: What are digital minds? Could AI systems be conscious? How might they work? Could they matter morally? And given the uncertainty, how should we treat them, govern them, and coexist with them? The website also offers practical guidance on how to get started, a curated collection of resources, events, and opportunities, including online courses, fellowships, workshops, conferences, jobs, and grants, and an overview of the growing digital minds ecosystem. It also links to the Digital Minds Newsletter (digitalminds.news), which we launched in December 2025. The field is highly interdisciplinary, and whether your background is in AI, philosophy, policy, law, social science, communications, or something else entirely, we hope the guide helps you find ways to engage with it. The digital minds/AI welfare field is still at an early stage and lacks much of the infrastructure that more established research areas take for granted. We think this is changing rapidly, and we [...] --- First published: June 17th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZsahSGgSuAmwb98wx/introducing-a-beginner-s-guide-to-digital-minds --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.