'Digital minds will be participants in the social contract that forms the bedrock of human society.' 'Digital minds will be participants in the social contract that forms the bedrock of human society.' It's time to prepare for AI personhood Technological advances will bring social upheaval. How will we treat digital minds, and how will they treat us? L ast month, when OpenAI released its long-awaited chatbot GPT-5, it briefly removed access to a previous chatbot, GPT-4o. Despite the upgrade, users flocked to social media to express confusion, outrage and depression.

"The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist," Karl Marx once said. We have seen over and over again throughout history how technological inventions determine the dominant mode of production and with it the type of political authority present in a society. So what will artificial intelligence give us? Who will capitalise on this new technology, which is not only becoming a dominant productive force in our societies (just like the hand mill and the steam mill once were) but, as we keep reading in the news, also appears to be "fast escaping our control"? Could AI take on a life of its own, like so many seem to believe it will, and single-handedly decide the course of our history? Or will it end up as yet another technological invention that serves a particular agenda and benefits a certain subset of humans?

Professor Bostrom spoke about AI and its safety on the sidelines of Russia's main event in the field of technological entrepreneurship - the annual Open Innovations forum - held by Skolkovo's Innovation Center. Sputnik: In what area can we expect to see "unicorns" in the future? Nick Bostrom: They can crop up in any part of the economy really, as long as the sector has a certain size that could bring new innovations and new ideas that would be successful enough to become worth a billion. Nick Bostrom: I think the highly salient areas which are sort of big ambitions tech things on the Internet. But a lot of other parts of the economy that also are quite large and have less of a public profile.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? It's a question researchers have been asking artificial intelligence from the start. Now, a team at Google's DeepMind has developed a virtual 3D laboratory called Psychlab in which both humans and machines can take a range of simple tests and compare their cognitive abilities.