People could still pay for animal products from animals that are more traditionally/āconventionally raised, without new technologies, for political, religious or other identity reasons. This could be most (social) conservatives. And AI could make the worldās poor (social) conservatives much wealthier and able to afford far more animal products.
The cost to avert the suffering would be trivial, but so too would be the cost of conventional animal products, if and because everyone is rich. People could also refuse payment or other incentives to avoid conventional animal products.
And animals could continue to be bred for productivity at the cost of welfare, like has been done for broilers (although this trend for broilers is reversing in the West, because of animal advocacy from our extended community). Genetic engineering could also happen, but people averse to cultured and plant-based products might be averse to that, too, anyway. Some may be selectively averse, though.
Iād guess slaughter would be more humane, with better stunning, and maybe anaesthesia/āpainkillers would actually be used widely for painful mutilation procedures, and/āor weād just mutilate less. Iād guess people mostly wouldnāt oppose those, although many Muslims do oppose stunning for slaughter for religious reasons.
And high welfare farming can be done in ways acceptable to conservatives, e.g. fairly natural, natural breeds, mostly outdoors, or with lots of space and enrichment. However, they may oppose transition towards that for political reasons. They tend to vote against farmed animal welfare reforms, probably not just for cost reasons, but also for political reasons.
Post-singularity worlds where people have the freedom to cause enormous animal suffering as a byproduct of legacy food production methods, despite having the option to not do so fully subsidized by third parties, seem like they probably overlap substantially with worlds where people have the freedom to spin up large quantities of digital entities capable of suffering and torture them forever. If you think such outcomes are likely, I claim that this is even more worthy of intervention. I personally donāt expect to have either option in most post-singularity worlds where weāre around, though I guess I would be slightly less surprised to have the option to torture animals than the option to torture ems (though I havenāt thought about it too hard yet).
But, as I said above, if you think itās plausible that weāll have the option to continue torturing animals post-singularity, this seems like a much more important outcome to try to avert than anything happening today.
Coming back to this, on what timeline do you expect this kind of growth in wealth to happen, making animal welfare extremely cheap?
Or, with what probability would it not happen for at least another 15 years (and us not all dying for at least that long)? Iād guess 15 years is long enough for many animal welfare interventions to have significant impact, although on the shorter end. Some take several years to have any welfare impacts at all.
Iām imagining we could just discount welfare impacts by such probabilities. Animal welfare could still look quite cost-effective even after that, but itāll depend on the probabilities.
If Iām understanding your question correctly, that part of my expectation is almost entirely conditional on being in a post-ASI world. Before then, if interest in (effectively) reducing animal suffering stays roughly the size of āEAā, then I donāt particularly expect it to be become cheap enough to subsize people farming animals to raise them in humane conditions. (This expectation becomes weaker with longer AI timelines, but I havenāt though that hard about what the world looks like in 20+ years without strong AI, and how that affects the marginal cost of various farmed animal welfare interventions.)
So my timelines on that are pretty much just my AI timelines, conditioned on āwe donāt all dieā (which are shifted a bit longer than my overall AI timelines, but not by that much).
People could still pay for animal products from animals that are more traditionally/āconventionally raised, without new technologies, for political, religious or other identity reasons. This could be most (social) conservatives. And AI could make the worldās poor (social) conservatives much wealthier and able to afford far more animal products.
The cost to avert the suffering would be trivial, but so too would be the cost of conventional animal products, if and because everyone is rich. People could also refuse payment or other incentives to avoid conventional animal products.
And animals could continue to be bred for productivity at the cost of welfare, like has been done for broilers (although this trend for broilers is reversing in the West, because of animal advocacy from our extended community). Genetic engineering could also happen, but people averse to cultured and plant-based products might be averse to that, too, anyway. Some may be selectively averse, though.
Iād guess slaughter would be more humane, with better stunning, and maybe anaesthesia/āpainkillers would actually be used widely for painful mutilation procedures, and/āor weād just mutilate less. Iād guess people mostly wouldnāt oppose those, although many Muslims do oppose stunning for slaughter for religious reasons.
And high welfare farming can be done in ways acceptable to conservatives, e.g. fairly natural, natural breeds, mostly outdoors, or with lots of space and enrichment. However, they may oppose transition towards that for political reasons. They tend to vote against farmed animal welfare reforms, probably not just for cost reasons, but also for political reasons.
Post-singularity worlds where people have the freedom to cause enormous animal suffering as a byproduct of legacy food production methods, despite having the option to not do so fully subsidized by third parties, seem like they probably overlap substantially with worlds where people have the freedom to spin up large quantities of digital entities capable of suffering and torture them forever. If you think such outcomes are likely, I claim that this is even more worthy of intervention. I personally donāt expect to have either option in most post-singularity worlds where weāre around, though I guess I would be slightly less surprised to have the option to torture animals than the option to torture ems (though I havenāt thought about it too hard yet).
But, as I said above, if you think itās plausible that weāll have the option to continue torturing animals post-singularity, this seems like a much more important outcome to try to avert than anything happening today.
Coming back to this, on what timeline do you expect this kind of growth in wealth to happen, making animal welfare extremely cheap?
Or, with what probability would it not happen for at least another 15 years (and us not all dying for at least that long)? Iād guess 15 years is long enough for many animal welfare interventions to have significant impact, although on the shorter end. Some take several years to have any welfare impacts at all.
Iām imagining we could just discount welfare impacts by such probabilities. Animal welfare could still look quite cost-effective even after that, but itāll depend on the probabilities.
If Iām understanding your question correctly, that part of my expectation is almost entirely conditional on being in a post-ASI world. Before then, if interest in (effectively) reducing animal suffering stays roughly the size of āEAā, then I donāt particularly expect it to be become cheap enough to subsize people farming animals to raise them in humane conditions. (This expectation becomes weaker with longer AI timelines, but I havenāt though that hard about what the world looks like in 20+ years without strong AI, and how that affects the marginal cost of various farmed animal welfare interventions.)
So my timelines on that are pretty much just my AI timelines, conditioned on āwe donāt all dieā (which are shifted a bit longer than my overall AI timelines, but not by that much).