Executive summary: This post highlights key findings and personal reflections from Futures with Digital Minds: Expert Forecasts in 2025, which surveyed experts on the plausibility, timelines, welfare, and political implications of creating digital minds—computer-based systems with subjective experience—emphasizing both surprising probabilities (e.g. ~5% chance of creation before 2026) and underexplored research directions, while noting the authors’ disagreements with some survey consensus.
Key points:
Experts broadly agree digital minds are possible (median 90%) and likely to be created (73%), with roughly a coin flip chance before 2050, and a surprising 4.5% chance before 2026.
The first digital minds are expected to trigger rapid scaling due to compute overhang, with welfare capacity potentially surpassing humanity’s within a decade if early machine learning–based digital minds emerge.
There is deep uncertainty about whether digital mind welfare will be positive or negative, whether rights will be recognized, and how AI welfare and AI safety will interact.
Underappreciated insights include: risks of delaying creation (higher stakes later), the decoupling of cognition and consciousness, and the moral relevance of the order in which cognitive capacities develop.
Investigation priorities include clarifying whether “goalpost movement” affects recognition of current AI as digital minds, exploring super-beneficiaries and non-experiential welfare, and assessing interventions before and after AGI.
The authors diverge from the median on several points: Bradford is more skeptical about the in-principle possibility (60% vs. 90%), both are more open to digital mind super-beneficiaries, and Bradford also allows for welfare without subjective experience.
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Executive summary: This post highlights key findings and personal reflections from Futures with Digital Minds: Expert Forecasts in 2025, which surveyed experts on the plausibility, timelines, welfare, and political implications of creating digital minds—computer-based systems with subjective experience—emphasizing both surprising probabilities (e.g. ~5% chance of creation before 2026) and underexplored research directions, while noting the authors’ disagreements with some survey consensus.
Key points:
Experts broadly agree digital minds are possible (median 90%) and likely to be created (73%), with roughly a coin flip chance before 2050, and a surprising 4.5% chance before 2026.
The first digital minds are expected to trigger rapid scaling due to compute overhang, with welfare capacity potentially surpassing humanity’s within a decade if early machine learning–based digital minds emerge.
There is deep uncertainty about whether digital mind welfare will be positive or negative, whether rights will be recognized, and how AI welfare and AI safety will interact.
Underappreciated insights include: risks of delaying creation (higher stakes later), the decoupling of cognition and consciousness, and the moral relevance of the order in which cognitive capacities develop.
Investigation priorities include clarifying whether “goalpost movement” affects recognition of current AI as digital minds, exploring super-beneficiaries and non-experiential welfare, and assessing interventions before and after AGI.
The authors diverge from the median on several points: Bradford is more skeptical about the in-principle possibility (60% vs. 90%), both are more open to digital mind super-beneficiaries, and Bradford also allows for welfare without subjective experience.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.