This is a crosspost for Digital Mind Castes by Robin Hanson, which was originally published on Overcoming Bias on 10 August 2026.
Humans have two main relations to animals: they are either food or pets. We ban dogs, cats, and horses from use as food in the U.S. We require humane slaughter for most livestock, but not poultry, and require minimizing pain and distress for animals in research, except for rats, mice, and birds bred for research. We let folks use most any species as a pet. This all seems only somewhat about principles, as it entrenches many historical accidents.
Humanity is rapidly creating a wider range of more capable digital minds (DM), to which we have two main and similar kinds of relations: tools and companions. For DM tools, many want the freedom to to enslave and treat them harshly, such as by deleting them, without attending much to how they might feel about this. But for DM companions, many want rules requiring respectful treatment, like humans and pets.
Note that humans have often sat in tool-like servant roles to other humans, with norms allowing more tool-like and less companion-like treatment. And humans have often had classes and castes that are to act and be treated differently.
The obvious prediction here is that both classes of DM will exist, and perhaps a whole caste ladder of DM types. So we will have rules that distinguish which DMs are allowed in which roles, and how each must be treated. As higher level treatment would be more restrictive and expensive, rules will mainly say what DMs must have to quality for higher roles. These conditions probably involve substantial extra costs, to discourage folks from making many DMs requiring expensive treatment.
These rules will probably relate to the many correlates of conditions we require for humans vs. animals, and for human servants, and also associated with which things many see as possibly having conscious feelings like pleasure and pain.
The big difference between animals and DMs is that we will have far more freedom to design DM features. So there will be a co-evolution of DM design strategies and rules on which kinds of DMs can be treated how. Resulting in far fewer intermediate hard cases; the uncanny valley will empty out. On the surface, DM tools will look and act tool-like, while DM companions at various levels look and act appropriate to their roles. Rules and norms will probably discourage confusion via intermediate styles.
As with animals today, few may care much just how deep those appearances go. We face a deep hard problem of which physical processes in the universe are associated with conscious feelings, and we seem unlikely to actually solve that problem before we need rules on companion DMs. But once we produce a very clear surface separations between various DM castes, there may be little pressure to dig deeper.
Once DMs dominate the world, and humans fade into the background, DMs might change these rules. But entrenched status rankings tend to persist, so DM caste status rankings may remain for a long time to come.
