This is a really great post!! I really appreciated the point industry consolidation point. I also appreciate how you describe advocacy for PLF as a âframingâ loss, since it implicitly concedes that we will be factory farming. This framing loss is an issue with a lot of welfarist interventions, and I donât think means we need to rule such interventions out, but I think it does make these sorts of interventions less attractive for public-facing campaigns. I think people sometimes underestimate the badness of framing loss, and I think this post makes the point really sharply; thanks.
I think there are some narrative reasons why opposing the worst instances of PLF might make attractive campaign targets: the industry is still underdeveloped, automated farming is disturbing to the public, small farmers might be willing to support these campaigns (because of the concentration effects of PLF), and there are existing ties between animal advocates and AI firms (through EA). Some of these arguments are stronger than others of course.
I think PLF is likely to disproportionately increase the efficiency of farming small animals. This is because it allows farmers to deploy individual level monitoring where it was previously infeasible (because the labor costs of monitoring individual animals on e.g. a chicken farm with tens of thousands of animals is too high). This is another reason why the total number of animals farmed is likely to increase as a result of increased PLF adoption.
Another article that people might be interested in is this one, which proposes specific ethical restrictions/âguidelines for PLF.
This is a really great post!! I really appreciated the point industry consolidation point. I also appreciate how you describe advocacy for PLF as a âframingâ loss, since it implicitly concedes that we will be factory farming. This framing loss is an issue with a lot of welfarist interventions, and I donât think means we need to rule such interventions out, but I think it does make these sorts of interventions less attractive for public-facing campaigns. I think people sometimes underestimate the badness of framing loss, and I think this post makes the point really sharply; thanks.
I wrote a similar post arguing that animal advocates should oppose PLF, available here. A few ideas from that piece that I think are complementary to this one:
I think there are some narrative reasons why opposing the worst instances of PLF might make attractive campaign targets: the industry is still underdeveloped, automated farming is disturbing to the public, small farmers might be willing to support these campaigns (because of the concentration effects of PLF), and there are existing ties between animal advocates and AI firms (through EA). Some of these arguments are stronger than others of course.
I think PLF is likely to disproportionately increase the efficiency of farming small animals. This is because it allows farmers to deploy individual level monitoring where it was previously infeasible (because the labor costs of monitoring individual animals on e.g. a chicken farm with tens of thousands of animals is too high). This is another reason why the total number of animals farmed is likely to increase as a result of increased PLF adoption.
Another article that people might be interested in is this one, which proposes specific ethical restrictions/âguidelines for PLF.