Kudos for taking on something important & outside the canonical EA paths!
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My initial thought on invertebrate sentience is similar to my thinking about animal welfare interventions generally: in the long run, the main effect of this kind of work will probably be how much it impacts humanity’s moral circle.
In optimistic scenarios, humans will steer the fates of all other species for the foreseeable future (we will at least give a lot of input to our successors, in the transhumanist case).
So the main thing to get right is ensuring that humans steer in a good direction. More on this here.
Kudos for taking on something important & outside the canonical EA paths!
---
My initial thought on invertebrate sentience is similar to my thinking about animal welfare interventions generally: in the long run, the main effect of this kind of work will probably be how much it impacts humanity’s moral circle.
In optimistic scenarios, humans will steer the fates of all other species for the foreseeable future (we will at least give a lot of input to our successors, in the transhumanist case).
So the main thing to get right is ensuring that humans steer in a good direction. More on this here.
(Only applies if you hold a longtermist view.)