If animals continue to exist in a post-AGI world, animal suffering will not persist
Either AI goes badly and animals will probably cease to exist because they’re made of atoms useful for other things.
Or humans will look out for animals themselves whether the AI cares about them independently of human interests or not. I expect in a post-AGI world the technology quickly appears to eliminate animals suffering through plenty of different means while preserving whatever ecological benefits that suffering otherwise may have enabled. I am taking suffering here to mean egregious suffering however, since there’s very obvious reasons people will want to keep certain small amounts of suffering for various reasons. When technology makes more morally palatable alternatives possible though, I expect people to eventually no longer to be willing to tolerate the egregious suffering which exists within nature. Though I expect upon a very superficial glance the natural world wouldn’t appear to be any different (by design) and that existing organisms would probably be given very utopian seeming existences rather than culled or anything dystopian seeming like that.
Either AI goes badly and animals will probably cease to exist because they’re made of atoms useful for other things.
Or humans will look out for animals themselves whether the AI cares about them independently of human interests or not. I expect in a post-AGI world the technology quickly appears to eliminate animals suffering through plenty of different means while preserving whatever ecological benefits that suffering otherwise may have enabled. I am taking suffering here to mean egregious suffering however, since there’s very obvious reasons people will want to keep certain small amounts of suffering for various reasons. When technology makes more morally palatable alternatives possible though, I expect people to eventually no longer to be willing to tolerate the egregious suffering which exists within nature. Though I expect upon a very superficial glance the natural world wouldn’t appear to be any different (by design) and that existing organisms would probably be given very utopian seeming existences rather than culled or anything dystopian seeming like that.