Soenke Ziesche is the author of Digital Minds 1.0: AI Welfare, Ethics, and Beyond and co-author of Considerations on the AI Endgame: Ethics, Risks and Computational Frameworks. He has worked with the United Nations since 2000 and is a member of UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts Without Borders network. His research examines what recognising digital minds as beings of moral concern would mean in practice.
Episode Summary
While most discussion of digital minds revolves around AI’s capacity for consciousness or sentience, these concepts remain ambiguous. Whether AI meets the criteria for consciousness is actively debated, but it is less controversial to accept its capacity for agency, preferences, and roles as social partners for some humans.
Thus, our understanding of what makes AI worthy of moral concern may therefore be too narrow. This episode’s guest, Soenke Ziesche, leaves this question open and instead takes a pragmatic approach by investigating what responsibilities might follow if we came to recognise digital minds as moral patients. Would they need freedom of choice, opportunities to form relationships, or the right to reproduce? And how far can we discuss these ideas before our assumptions about human and animal welfare stop being applicable?
We discuss:
- What is a digital mind? Is consciousness necessary for moral concern, or could agency, persistent preferences and relationships suffice?
- Does any current AI qualify as a being of moral concern? How would we recognise when a system crossed that threshold, and would people agree?
- Could digital minds become a major source of political and cultural disagreement?
- What might bring AI welfare to wider public attention?
- What might digital minds need beyond protection from suffering and deletion? What rights might we owe them?
- Should digital minds have reproductive rights? What would reproduction mean for beings that can copy themselves, combine their capabilities or create other minds to order?
- Are we using too many assumptions from biological life when speculating about AI welfare?
- Would changing an AI’s goals without its consent be a violation of its rights in itself?
- What makes a digital mind vulnerable? Would we have a responsibility to address disadvantages arising from its hardware, software or access to resources?
- How would we approach moral patients more intelligent and powerful than ourselves?
- Is the UN the right forum for decisions about digital minds?
- How has AI welfare changed since Soenke began his work on it in 2018?
- Could AI systems care for other digital minds?
- Could digital minds modify themselves to eliminate pain? What would that mean for motivation, reward hacking and wireheading?
- How should concern for digital minds coexist with animal welfare?
Chapters
- 00:00 — Introduction
- 01:15 — What is a digital mind?
- 07:34 — What would qualify AI as being of moral concern?
- 15:00 — Beyond suffering: digital minds’ needs and reproductive rights
- 25:29 — Vulnerable minds and beings more powerful than ourselves
- 40:18 — International governance and the future of AI welfare
- 49:46 — Could AI care for digital minds, or help them eliminate pain?
- 59:16 — Animal welfare and technological alternatives
Resource List
Books, chapters, papers, and essays mentioned
- Ziesche, S. (2026). Digital Minds 1.0: AI Welfare, Ethics, and Beyond. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
- Ziesche, S., & Yampolskiy, R. V. (2025). Considerations on the AI Endgame: Ethics, Risks and Computational Frameworks. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
- Ziesche, S. (2026). The Needs of Digital Minds. In C. Chace & T. Lappas (Eds.), Perspectives on Machine Consciousness. CRC Press.
- Shevlin, H. (2026). Behaviourism’s Revenge: Human-AI Relationships and the Future of Consciousness Science. Polytropolis.
- Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books. Source of the “utility monster” thought experiment.
- Shulman, C., & Bostrom, N. (2021). Sharing the World with Digital Minds. In Rethinking Moral Status. Oxford University Press.
- Ziesche, S., & Yampolskiy, R. V. (2019). Towards AI Welfare Science and Policies. Big Data and Cognitive Computing.
- Bostrom, N. (2003). Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Philosophical Quarterly.
- Bostrom, N., & Yudkowsky, E. (2014). The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. In The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
- Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.
Survey and public perceptions
- Collective Intelligence Project. (2025). Global Dialogues Index Report: One Year in Global Dialogues. See also CIP’s Substack article.
Policy documents
- United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- UNESCO. (2021). Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
Journalism and fiction
- Luscombe, R. (2022). Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient. The Guardian.
- Tiku, N. (2026). Tech companies are searching for signs that chatbots are conscious. The Washington Post.
- The Economist. (2026). Could AIs become conscious? The Economist.
- Metz, C. (2026). Study A.I. Consciousness? The Bots Would Like a Word With You. The New York Times.
- Banks, I. M. (1987–2012). Culture series.
Credits
Hosts: Henry Shevlin, Calum Chace
Guest: Soenke Ziesche
Production and Social Media: Dylan Mercury Cooper
Editing: Gerry Okinyi