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Sprint projectAug 17, 2026Colombo

Digital Consciousness, as measured by dollars and adjusted for inflation

Mushraf Ali Anver · Team Free_Sunday_and_bored_student

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Digital Consciousness, as measured by dollars and adjusted for inflation

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The Economy is the marketplace of the collective consciousness containing eight billion minds. The Economics of Consciousness examines economic theory against models of consciousness. The fundamental question is not about consciousness itself but the practical impacts on the economy where all decisions by conscious agents interact. The implications suggest global demand, constraints, planes of existence and interactions either diverge or evolve due to the introduction of economic agents at scale. Using Diamond-Ramsey models, the simple decison of whether digital minds save or consume their economic activty can radically change the world economy and could be approximately 72× the productivity effect the AI-economics literature currently debates

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How much would this matter for the field if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. This was an unusually ambitious sprint project, pairing a reflective essay with a formal Diamond-Ramsey model of digital minds entering the economy. Treating digital minds as demand-side agents and making property rights explicit is a genuinely interesting framing, and the 23-test verification suite is a great practice to bring into this kind of work.

    My main hesitation is that the mechanism(s) described do not really require consciousness. It needs agents that work, consume, save, and can hold property rights, so much of the analysis would apply equally to non-conscious agentic AI or any variation thereof. Some of this would apply to widespread autonomous systems of programmatic form as long as they select and execute purchases. Consciousness matters mainly for the moral case for letting these agents retain their wages. Making that distinction clearer would sharpen the paper and make its relevance more immediate. The author is appropriately candid that the key parameters are calibrated and that the AI-assisted calculations still need manual checking. This is a thoughtful and original contribution that connects nicely to the sprint's broader question of what treating potential digital minds seriously could mean in practice. It would be interesting to expand into non-capitalist economies' implications as well. Genuinely enjoyed reading.

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  2. The paper highlights a real issue in modelling the economics effects of AI: if AI agents are understood as economic agents, who may consume and save, then the human welfare implications of an AI-assisted economy flip.

    The paper has an interesting kernel currently obscured by some of the prose. It should spend more time thinking about the primitives and engaging with some of the AI rights lit (as in the Goldstein-Salib tradition and Robin Hanson's work)

Cite this project

@misc{anver2026digital,
  title = {{Digital Consciousness, as measured by dollars and adjusted for inflation}},
  author = {Mushraf Ali Anver},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/digital-consciousness-as-measured-by-dollars-and-adjusted-for-inflation-c434}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/digital-consciousness-as-measured-by-dollars-and-adjusted-for-inflation-c434}
}

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