{"slug": "introducing-a-beginners-guide-to-digital-minds", "title": "Introducing A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Minds", "summary": "A team of researchers and organizations launched A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Minds, a website introducing AI consciousness, AI welfare, and the moral implications of digital minds. The guide offers resources, events, and practical guidance to help newcomers engage with the interdisciplinary field, which is still in its early stages.", "body_md": "We’ve launched [A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Minds](https://digitalminds.guide/) (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.\n\nThe 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?\n\nThe 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](https://www.digitalminds.news/) (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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nWe 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.\n\nIf you find it useful, please consider sharing it with others who might be interested.\n\nThe project was developed by our team in coordination with leading experts and organizations in the digital minds community, including [Cambridge Digital Minds](https://digitalminds.cam/), [PRISM](https://www.prism-global.com/), the [Center for Mind Ethics and Policy](https://nonhumanminds.org/), [Eleos AI Research](https://eleosai.org/), and [Reciprocal Research](https://reciprocalresearch.org/), among others. It was also partly inspired by Avi Parrack and Štěpán Los’ substantial early work on the [Digital Minds: A Quickstart Guide](https://aviparrack.substack.com/p/digital-minds-a-quickstart-guide) project. We used Claude Opus in developing the website and its content.\n\nWe 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/introducing-a-beginners-guide-to-digital-minds", "canonical_source": "https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZsahSGgSuAmwb98wx/introducing-a-beginner-s-guide-to-digital-minds", "published_at": "2026-06-17 13:09:15+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-17 13:28:38.020992+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-ethics", "ai-research", "ai-safety", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Cambridge Digital Minds", "PRISM", "Center for Mind Ethics and Policy", "Eleos AI Research", "Reciprocal Research", "Claude Opus", "Avi Parrack", "Štěpán Los"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/introducing-a-beginners-guide-to-digital-minds", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/introducing-a-beginners-guide-to-digital-minds.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/introducing-a-beginners-guide-to-digital-minds.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/introducing-a-beginners-guide-to-digital-minds.jsonld"}}