I think this post is unreasonably optimistic. A repeated theme in your post is that exponential growth in technology and the animal advocacy community could result in drastic pro-animal change, but it ignores the fact that there could also be exponential growth in the animal agriculture industry and anti-animal attitudes. There has been a rise in veganism, but there has also been a rise in meat-eating. AI could be used to convince people to become vegan, but it could also convince people that eating meat is okay and they shouldn’t worry about it. AI could be used to come up with welfare-improving interventions in animal agriculture, but it could also be used to come up with profit-maximizing interventions, and I suspect the latter tools are far more likely to be applied. I don’t see a persuasive reason why the animal welfare movement will gain an advantage over competing interest groups.
I agree that these technologies are also being used by the animal agriculture industry and that represents a very serious threat to the animal protection movement. A large part of my theory of change involves taking actions to slow the adoption of these technologies in animal agriculture whilst increasing them in animal protection, but I thought that was outside of the scope of this post given how long it already was.
I spoke about this fairly extensively at the International Animal Rights Conference though and if you’re interested in learning more about how we can address that threat, here is a link to the recording of the talk.
I think this post is unreasonably optimistic. A repeated theme in your post is that exponential growth in technology and the animal advocacy community could result in drastic pro-animal change, but it ignores the fact that there could also be exponential growth in the animal agriculture industry and anti-animal attitudes. There has been a rise in veganism, but there has also been a rise in meat-eating. AI could be used to convince people to become vegan, but it could also convince people that eating meat is okay and they shouldn’t worry about it. AI could be used to come up with welfare-improving interventions in animal agriculture, but it could also be used to come up with profit-maximizing interventions, and I suspect the latter tools are far more likely to be applied. I don’t see a persuasive reason why the animal welfare movement will gain an advantage over competing interest groups.
I agree that these technologies are also being used by the animal agriculture industry and that represents a very serious threat to the animal protection movement. A large part of my theory of change involves taking actions to slow the adoption of these technologies in animal agriculture whilst increasing them in animal protection, but I thought that was outside of the scope of this post given how long it already was.
I spoke about this fairly extensively at the International Animal Rights Conference though and if you’re interested in learning more about how we can address that threat, here is a link to the recording of the talk.