Estimating the Scale of Digital Minds

TL;DR

This paper estimates that hundreds of millions of digital minds, AI systems with traits like agency and personality, could exist by 2050, based on adoption trends and AI hardware development, despite significant uncertainty.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-approach framework combining use case adoption projections and AI hardware trends to estimate digital mind prevalence.

Findings

Potential digital minds by 2050: hundreds of millions

Estimate has large uncertainty range

Analysis combines demand and supply perspectives

Abstract

This report estimates the potential number of digital minds, defined as AI systems exhibiting observable traits such as agency, personality, and intelligence, in the coming decades. It employs two complementary approaches: first, examining specific use cases for digital minds and projecting adoption rates for each; second, analyzing trends in AI chip production and efficiency independent of digital mind applications. Together, these supply- and demand-side perspectives suggest that hundreds of millions of digital minds could exist by 2050, though this estimate carries substantial uncertainty spanning several orders of magnitude.