Meditations on Digital Minds is my Substack about digital minds, i.e. AI systems that merit moral consideration for their own sake (Subscribe · Audio versions on Spotify). Below are links to its posts, grouped by topic, followed by The Digital Minds Newsletter issues, which I help write.
My 2025 in review (2025)
Some preconditions for effective digital minds governance (2025)
Visualizing pros and cons of different kinds of digital minds governance (2025)
Should digital minds governance prevent, protect, or integrate? (2025)
Does preventive digital minds governance require a ban on the creation of digital minds? (2026)
Some possible futures with and without AI moral patients (2026)
The digital minds field should do some contingency planning (2026)
Large-scale harms to AI moral patients: a typology of risk factors (2026)
Digital minds macrostrategy: research directions and open questions (2026)
A dilemma for biological naturalists about moral patiency (part 1) (2026)
On Anil Seth's "Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism" (2026)
The attention-welfare link (2026)
On Bengio and Elmoznino's "Illusions of AI consciousness" (2025)
On shutdown buttons (2026)
Grace as an alignment target (2026)
Model weight preservation (2026)
Preference gaps as a safeguard against AI self-replication (2025) (with Elliott Thornley)
AI self-replication roundup (2025)
"Studying AI Welfare Empirically": highlights and reflections (2026)
Highlights from our digital minds forecasting survey (2025) (with Lucius Caviola)
Highlights from "In Search of a Biological Crux for AI Consciousness" (2025)
Highlights from "Varieties of Moral Agency and Risks of Digital Dystopia" (2025) (with Adam Bradley)
Recorded talk: "AI Alignment Versus AI Ethical Treatment: 10 Challenges" (2026)
Recorded talk: "Status Quo Treatment of AI Moral Patients as a Catastrophic Risk" (2025)
#5: Protecting AI, Perspectives of Religious Scholars, and Can We Trust AI Self-Reports? (2026) (with Ria Viswanathan, Will Millership, and Lucius Caviola)
#4: The J-Space Debate, Agent Swarms, and Pacing Frontier AI (2026) (with Ria Viswanathan, Mitch Alexander, Lucius Caviola, and Will Millership)
#3: Functional Emotions and The Pope's Encyclical on AI (2026) (with Will Millership, Mitch Alexander, and Lucius Caviola)
#2: The Vatican, AI Legal Personhood, and Claude's Constitution (2026) (with Will Millership and Lucius Caviola)
#1: Digital Minds in 2025: A Year in Review (2025) (with Lucius Caviola and Will Millership)