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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 hope this guide can help make the field more accessible to newcomers and support its continued growth.
We hope this guide can become a public good for the field, shaped and improved by the broader digital minds community. Feedback and suggestions are very welcome, especially on what would be most useful to add as the project develops.
If you find it useful, please consider sharing it with others who might be interested.
The project was developed by our team in coordination with leading experts and organizations in the digital minds community, including Cambridge Digital Minds, PRISM, the Center for Mind Ethics and Policy, Eleos AI Research, and Reciprocal Research, among others. It was also partly inspired by Avi Parrack and Štěpán Los’ substantial early work on the Digital Minds: A Quickstart Guide project. We used Claude Opus in developing the website and its content.
We are grateful to the many members of the community who generously reviewed early versions of the content and provided feedback, including Austin Smith, Avi Parrack, Bradford Saad, Bridget Harris, Cameron Berg, Jeff Sebo, Leonard Dung, Rosie Campbell, Sofia Fogel, and Štěpán Los.
