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
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Inside Claude’s J-Space: Digital Minds Reading Group
Martin Luther King Library, 901 G Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USJoin DC Digital Minds for the first meeting of our new monthly reading group, where we’ll gather to explore important new work on AI minds, behavior, cognition, and moral status.
For our inaugural discussion, we’ll discuss Anthropic’s blog post, “A Global Workspace in Language Models.” The researchers identify a collection of internal representations they call the J-space, which appears to make certain information available across different parts of the model for reporting, reasoning, and guiding behavior. Anthropic connects these findings to the idea of access consciousness, a functional concept drawn from philosophy and cognitive science.
What does that mean? How strong is the evidence? What does the paper establish, and what remains uncertain? We'll carefully digest what Anthropic has put forward, understand the methods and claims, ask good questions, and decide for ourselves what we think.
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.Before the Meeting
Please read Anthropic’s blog post, linked above. Those who would like to go deeper are encouraged, but not required, to read the full paper, "Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models."This will be the first gathering of a monthly DC Digital Minds reading group, on the second Thursday of the month. Future selections will explore research and ideas relevant to understanding increasingly complex AI systems and navigating their place in human society.
2 attendees
Past events
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