I disagree here. Even though I think it’s more likely than not space factory farming won’t go on forever, it’s not impossible that it will stay, and the chance isn’t like vanishingly low. I wrote a post on it.
Also, for cause prioritization., we need to look at the expected values from the tail scenarios. Even if the chances could be as low as 0.5%, or 0.1%, the huge stake might mean the expected values could still be astronomical, which is what I argue for space factory farming. I think what we need to do is to prove why factory farming will go away in the near/mid future 100%, which I don’t see good arguments for.
For example, there is no proof that cellular agriculture is more energy and resource efficient than all kinds of factory farming. In fact, insect farming, and the raising of certain species of fish, are very efficient. Cellular agriculture also takes a lot of energy to go against entropy. This is especially true if the requirement for the alignment of protein structures is high. In terms of organizing things together against entropy, biological beings are actually quite efficient, and cellular agriculture might have a hard task to outperform all animal protein. There needs to be serious scientific research specifically addressing this issue, before we can claim that cellular agriculture will be more efficient in all possible ways.
On human becoming compassionate. I feel pessimistic about that, because here we are talking about moral circle expansion beyond our own species membership. Within species, whether it be women, people of color, elderly, children, LGBTQ, they all share very similar genes with dominant humans (which generally were white men, in history), neural structures (so that we can be sure that they suffer in similar ways), and we have shared natural languages. All these made it rather easy for dominant humans to understand dominated humans reasonable well. It won’t be the same for our treatment of nonhumans, such as nonhuman animals and digital minds without natural language capabilities.
I disagree here. Even though I think it’s more likely than not space factory farming won’t go on forever, it’s not impossible that it will stay, and the chance isn’t like vanishingly low. I wrote a post on it.
Also, for cause prioritization., we need to look at the expected values from the tail scenarios. Even if the chances could be as low as 0.5%, or 0.1%, the huge stake might mean the expected values could still be astronomical, which is what I argue for space factory farming. I think what we need to do is to prove why factory farming will go away in the near/mid future 100%, which I don’t see good arguments for.
For example, there is no proof that cellular agriculture is more energy and resource efficient than all kinds of factory farming. In fact, insect farming, and the raising of certain species of fish, are very efficient. Cellular agriculture also takes a lot of energy to go against entropy. This is especially true if the requirement for the alignment of protein structures is high. In terms of organizing things together against entropy, biological beings are actually quite efficient, and cellular agriculture might have a hard task to outperform all animal protein. There needs to be serious scientific research specifically addressing this issue, before we can claim that cellular agriculture will be more efficient in all possible ways.
On human becoming compassionate. I feel pessimistic about that, because here we are talking about moral circle expansion beyond our own species membership. Within species, whether it be women, people of color, elderly, children, LGBTQ, they all share very similar genes with dominant humans (which generally were white men, in history), neural structures (so that we can be sure that they suffer in similar ways), and we have shared natural languages. All these made it rather easy for dominant humans to understand dominated humans reasonable well. It won’t be the same for our treatment of nonhumans, such as nonhuman animals and digital minds without natural language capabilities.