Hi Saulius, thanks for your kind words! I do agree the longer-term ideas would be good to incorporate and I actually thought I put something about AI timelines in the alternative protein section but seems like I didn’t. I definitely do agree something like AI within the next 50 years (which is plausible as the links you reference say) could massively speed up the development of low-cost alternative proteins so that should be a factor pushing it towards being more likely. On other ways that it would change the world to affect farmed animals, as you say, that definitely does seem more complicated so it would be interesting to get the take on someone who works on AI.
On other considerations around human extinction, global catastrophes and other events that could change the future of humanity in huge ways, I agree it definitely does make it harder to plan and it’s not obvious what we should do in these cases. I think those cases probably a) warrant a lot more thought and b) seem much harder to design interventions for that will be robustly good. As Martin and you talk about below, it seems extremely challenging to predict good solutions for potentially very different futures whereas making the next 50 years go well for animals seems comparatively easier, and I generally believe making the next 50 years go well will be good for the next 500-5,000 years too (although this might not always be true).
I guess to clarify some of your points, is it that medium-term strategy may be unimportant as things could change very significantly, so we should try find ways to steer these future scenarios in ways that are conducive to good animal welfare (e.g. make sure ALLFED isn’t proposing insects etc.)?
Hi Saulius, thanks for your kind words! I do agree the longer-term ideas would be good to incorporate and I actually thought I put something about AI timelines in the alternative protein section but seems like I didn’t. I definitely do agree something like AI within the next 50 years (which is plausible as the links you reference say) could massively speed up the development of low-cost alternative proteins so that should be a factor pushing it towards being more likely. On other ways that it would change the world to affect farmed animals, as you say, that definitely does seem more complicated so it would be interesting to get the take on someone who works on AI.
On other considerations around human extinction, global catastrophes and other events that could change the future of humanity in huge ways, I agree it definitely does make it harder to plan and it’s not obvious what we should do in these cases. I think those cases probably a) warrant a lot more thought and b) seem much harder to design interventions for that will be robustly good. As Martin and you talk about below, it seems extremely challenging to predict good solutions for potentially very different futures whereas making the next 50 years go well for animals seems comparatively easier, and I generally believe making the next 50 years go well will be good for the next 500-5,000 years too (although this might not always be true).
I guess to clarify some of your points, is it that medium-term strategy may be unimportant as things could change very significantly, so we should try find ways to steer these future scenarios in ways that are conducive to good animal welfare (e.g. make sure ALLFED isn’t proposing insects etc.)?