Thanks for writing this Sam! This is a topic I’ve been giving some thought to as I read pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare writers like Robert Yaman (The Optimist’s Barn).
There are two assumptions you make that I think are worth interrogating.
Factory farming cannot be ‘fixed’? Some animal advocates believe that one of the possible end games for animal suffering in factory farming is making welfare so good that animals lives are net positive. I’m unsure if I think this is possible even in principle (it depends on one’s philosophy of wellbeing), but I’m open to it, and if it is, then PLF entrenching an optimised form of factory farming isn’t neccessarily a point against it—in fact it’s exactly what pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare want to happen. We can challenge the possibility of positive welfare factory farming, but I don’t think we can assume it away.
Public advocacy for fixing factory farming in the short-term is counterproductive if our goal is abolishing it in the long-term? I’m far from convinced of this. For example, I think there’s a good case to be made that (a) calling for the abolition of factory farming is so outside the overton window and/or so challenging of most people’s need to see themselves as good-people-that-aren’t-participating-in-a-moral-atrocity that it’s not an effective message for advocates today, (b) calling for reform is a lot more palatable to people, (c) people who are bought into the case for reform today will be more likely to be open to case for abolition tomorrow.
I think you make some strong points in this post though, which I plan to put to pro-PLF folks like Robert Yaman to see what they say. Specifically:
(a) The incentives for industry will remain to maximise profit with welfare as an externality which matters only insofar as it impacts profit due to consumer preferences. Therefore assuming that industry will be willing to trade-off any profit gains for welfare gains is naive, and assuming that using AI to maximise profit will improve welfare (let alone lead to net positive lives) is unjustified.
(b) Managing welfare through opaque blackbox-style optimisation technology, which is developed and deployed too fast for regulators to keep up, is not conducive to holding industry accountable
(c) Using AI towards the PLF end-game for suffering on factory farms instead of the alt-protein end-game for suffering on factory farms seems unwise given one has big downside risks (i.e. increasing total suffering and/or entrenching a food production system that creates net negative lives) and the other doesn’t. We’d need to believe that using AI to advance alt-proteins is far harder to prefer the PLF route, and I haven’t seen a good case for this.
Thanks for writing this Sam! This is a topic I’ve been giving some thought to as I read pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare writers like Robert Yaman (The Optimist’s Barn).
There are two assumptions you make that I think are worth interrogating.
Factory farming cannot be ‘fixed’? Some animal advocates believe that one of the possible end games for animal suffering in factory farming is making welfare so good that animals lives are net positive. I’m unsure if I think this is possible even in principle (it depends on one’s philosophy of wellbeing), but I’m open to it, and if it is, then PLF entrenching an optimised form of factory farming isn’t neccessarily a point against it—in fact it’s exactly what pro-PLF pro-animal-welfare want to happen. We can challenge the possibility of positive welfare factory farming, but I don’t think we can assume it away.
Public advocacy for fixing factory farming in the short-term is counterproductive if our goal is abolishing it in the long-term? I’m far from convinced of this. For example, I think there’s a good case to be made that (a) calling for the abolition of factory farming is so outside the overton window and/or so challenging of most people’s need to see themselves as good-people-that-aren’t-participating-in-a-moral-atrocity that it’s not an effective message for advocates today, (b) calling for reform is a lot more palatable to people, (c) people who are bought into the case for reform today will be more likely to be open to case for abolition tomorrow.
I think you make some strong points in this post though, which I plan to put to pro-PLF folks like Robert Yaman to see what they say. Specifically:
(a) The incentives for industry will remain to maximise profit with welfare as an externality which matters only insofar as it impacts profit due to consumer preferences. Therefore assuming that industry will be willing to trade-off any profit gains for welfare gains is naive, and assuming that using AI to maximise profit will improve welfare (let alone lead to net positive lives) is unjustified.
(b) Managing welfare through opaque blackbox-style optimisation technology, which is developed and deployed too fast for regulators to keep up, is not conducive to holding industry accountable
(c) Using AI towards the PLF end-game for suffering on factory farms instead of the alt-protein end-game for suffering on factory farms seems unwise given one has big downside risks (i.e. increasing total suffering and/or entrenching a food production system that creates net negative lives) and the other doesn’t. We’d need to believe that using AI to advance alt-proteins is far harder to prefer the PLF route, and I haven’t seen a good case for this.
Thanks again!