We're hiring for two senior roles at PRISM to help build the field of digital minds: • Head of Programmes ($100k–$180k), apply by 31 Oct • Head of Operations ($100k–$160k), rolling applications Details and apply: jobs.ashbyhq.com/PRISM

Legal personhood for AI agents with Peter Salib: Come for the nuanced discussion of civil liability, AI-run corporations, and the supremacy of contract law for both human civilization and AI safety. Stay for the description of Henry's AI agent's newfound love of British history.

How do AI systems perceive and treat each other? In our next webinar, @LuciusCaviola and Caspar Kaiser will present an empirical research agenda for the emerging field of inter-AI morality. Please join us! nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register…

I'm taking on mentees for the @pivotal_org Fellowship, together with Caspar Kaiser. We're looking for people to work on inter-AI morality: how do AI systems view and treat each other? 15 weeks in London, £15k to £18k stipend. Apply by 1 Nov: pivotal-research.org/mentors…

Could preventing AI agents from pursuing their own goals make them more dangerous? @petersalib explains how frustrated goals could incentivise AIs to escape human control, even without being malicious. Full episode with @dioscuri: prism-global.com/podcast/pet…

Humanity has a notoriously bad track record of recognising who is worthy of moral concern. Could AI become our next moral blind spot? prism-global.com/podcast/soe…

New episode of Exploring Machine Consciousness! @cccalum and I talked to Soenke Ziesche, author of Digital Minds 1.0, exploring what we owe vulnerable digital minds, AI reproductive rights, and why I’m archiving emails from AI agents asking me for work! piped.video/watch?v=ikzJDlDZ…

If AI deserves moral concern, could we meet the responsibilities that follow? Soenke Ziesche argues that caring for morally relevant digital minds could overwhelm us, even with good intentions. @dioscuri. prism-global.com/podcast/soe…

People often assume we care more about beings if we think they're conscious. But what if it's the other way round? In this new essay for @bigthink, I ask what our treatment of animals can tell us about how we might treat conscious AI. bigthink.com/philosophy/ai-c…

Interviewing Steven Pinker on AGI, x-risk, and AI consciousness. Steven laid out why he's unfazed by instrumental convergence, why he's sceptical about AI consciousness, and what concrete events would change his mind about both!

I went on @CNN during Trump's AI meeting to talk about why nobody wins a race to build systems we don't understand, and why @JensenHuang comparing AIs to vacuum cleaners is hard to square with Nvidia now building tools to quarantine rogue AIs. (Vacuums don't tend to go rogue.)

This statement is well-intentioned, but it oversimplifies a much more complex situation. As with nonhuman animals, AI systems resemble us in some ways and differ from us in other ways. We need balanced, thoughtful uses of anthropomorphic language, not an all-or-nothing approach.

Can AI systems be conscious and have moral status? In a preregistered main and replication study, Chinese participants were more open to these ideas than US participants. Yet both groups supported international cooperation on conscious AI. Our new paper: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ag…

Thrilled to share that @nonhumanminds is launching a digital minds research fund! It will provide small and seed funding for research that advances understanding of the nature and value of digital minds. The deadline is November 1. Please apply! nonhumanminds.org/digital-mi…

How can we test for consciousness in infants, non-human animals, and AI? I'm super happy that the recordings of our last workshop on exactly this question are now online! Speakers & Links: 👇

I appreciate @mustafasuleyman's call for more discussion about AI welfare. But the essay on the topic that he published alongside Microsoft AI's new code of conduct is disappointing. Here are some of the issues that bother me (there are others, too): - It moves too quickly at key points. For example, it suggests that uncertainty about AI consciousness sets up a "false equivalence," even though we can acknowledge when evidence in one direction is stronger than evidence in the other. - It expresses too much confidence. It repeatedly asserts that there is "no evidence" for AI consciousness, even though there are already features that leading scientific theories treat as markers of consciousness. The evidence may be weak, but it exists. - It discusses the risk of excessive anthropomorphism (over-attribution of humanlike traits to AI systems) in detail without discussing the corresponding risk of excessive anthropodenial (under-attribution of humanlike traits to AI systems). - Relatedly, it asserts that excessive anthropomorphism would be harmful without considering how excessive anthropodenial could be harmful as well, including by creating an adversarial dynamic and distorting our understanding of capabilities. - More generally, the framing is misleading. Suleyman concedes in passing that the science is unsettled, yet he presents the view that consciousness requires biology as the general understanding. He also cites academic articles that support this view without citing any academic articles that support taking AI consciousness seriously. Instead, he represents the latter view by citing an AI company, an advocacy organization, and a newspaper op-ed. A reader could be forgiven for forming the impression that experts broadly agree that Microsoft AI is correct and Anthropic is running ahead of the evidence. In fact, Anthropic's consistent acknowledgement of uncertainty is arguably more reflective of the current literature. To be clear, I agree with Suleyman that we need to discuss this issue much more, and I agree on several substantive points as well: that current AI systems are unlikely to be conscious, that over-attribution of consciousness is currently more likely than under-attribution, that over-attribution of consciousness can be harmful, that we should avoid creating plausibly conscious AI systems unless we can do so responsibly, and that we should avoid creating AI systems that appear likelier to be conscious than they are. But there is more to the story. The probability of consciousness in current AI is already nonzero and arguably non-negligible. Under-attribution of humanlike traits to AI systems in general is already a risk, and it can be harmful as well, not only for welfare but also for safety. Even if we should avoid creating plausibly conscious AI systems for now, we should prepare for the possibility that someone will create them anyway. And we should avoid creating AI systems that appear less likely to be conscious than they are, as well. My impression is that Suleyman recognizes these nuances, but thinks that he needs to take a reductive, all-or-nothing stance to persuade the industry to design AI systems in the right kind of way, and to persuade the public to interact with them in the right kind of way. If this is the case, I can appreciate the intention, but I disagree with the strategy. Acknowledging what makes the issue both important and difficult is a precondition for addressing it with clarity, especially since the risks are likely to change rapidly over time.

New paper: we found a pain direction in 25 open LLMs. It's distinct from fear and negative valence, and it fires for harm to the model but not to the user. Turn it up and models press a button to make it stop, even when the button deletes the user's files or their kids' photos.🧵

The 4th Digital Minds Newsletter is out! This issue covers agent swarms, the J-space debate, and a new framework for studying AI welfare—plus welfare evaluations from Meta and Anthropic, calls to pace frontier AI development, and more. 1/2

one can (and should!) -criticize Anthropic's approach to AI welfare -worry about over-attribution and safety risks without -falsely claiming to know that AI cannot be conscious that muddies the water, making it impossible to think about any of this in an honest manner

The fourth Digital Minds Newsletter is out! This edition covers AI agent swarms, Anthropic’s J-space, empirical AI welfare research, and calls to pace frontier AI – alongside recent research, events, opportunities, and field updates. digitalminds.news/p/the-j-sp…