About us
Humanity is at a pivot point. We’ve created systems that can reason with us, respond to us, challenge us, comfort us, imitate us, surprise us, and talk back. The Turing Test is in the rear-view mirror.
Now we have to figure out how to relate to this strange new presence.
Is an AI system a tool, a mirror, a collaborator, a companion — or something we do not yet have good language for? Could a machine ever be conscious? How would we know? What moral responsibilities might we have toward digital minds, if any? And even if today’s AI systems experience nothing at all, how does the way we treat them shape us?
These are not questions for AI labs alone. They are questions of human culture: how we think, speak, build, play, work, love, argue, imagine, and decide what kind of future we want.
This meetup is for anyone who wants thoughtful, open-ended conversation about the frontier where carbon meets silicon. You do not need to be an engineer, an AI insider, or a true believer. Skeptics, builders, philosophers, artists, writers, policy people, researchers, and the merely AI-curious are all welcome.
We’ll gather in bars, cafés, libraries, and other friendly spaces for loosely themed conversations about AI consciousness, alignment, ethics, potential machine welfare, human flourishing, tradeoffs, and the cultural choices ahead of us.
We'll compare notes, ask better questions, and help shape the culture forming around our relationship with AI.
New to our group? Please take our New Member Survey:
https://forms.gle/LmSNMwQ3KBT4CNcV9
Upcoming events
1
What We Talk to When We Talk to LLMs: Digital Minds Reading Group
Martin Luther King Library, 901 G Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USLOCATION NOTE: We’ll be in room 401-D.
Join DC Digital Minds for the fourth meeting of our monthly reading group, where we’ll gather to explore important new work on AI minds, behavior, cognition, and moral status.
Our first attendee-selected reading is here! For December's discussion, we’ll discuss David Chalmers' paper, “What We Talk To When We Talk to Language Models.” Chalmers is the New York University philosopher who coined the term the hard problem of consciousness. His paper tackles a deceptively simple question: When we have a conversation with an AI, who or what are we actually talking to?
Is our conversational partner the underlying language model, a particular instance of it, or something that emerges through an ongoing conversation? Can AI systems meaningfully have beliefs, desires, or identities of their own? Are AI personas merely fictional characters being simulated, or could there be something more to them? If an AI appears to persist across conversations, what makes it the same entity over time? And what might all this mean for AI consciousness, welfare, and moral status?
Join us to compare notes on these unprecedented questions.Beginners Welcome
No specialized technical background is required. Whether you work professionally in AI, approach these questions through philosophy or social science, or are simply find it fascinating, you're warmly invited. We’ll work through the paper together rather than expecting everyone to arrive as an expert.
Come for the interpretability research; stay for the interesting people and thoughtful conversation.The DC Digital Minds reading group meets on the second Thursday of the month -- though this month, owing to venue availability and the holidays, we're meeting on the first Thursday instead. Future selections will explore research and ideas relevant to understanding increasingly complex AI systems and navigating their place in human society.
19 attendees
Past events
7
