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 don’t expect to have either option in most post-singularity worlds where we’re 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 haven’t thought about it too hard yet).
But, as I said above, if you think it’s plausible that we’ll 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.
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 don’t expect to have either option in most post-singularity worlds where we’re 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 haven’t thought about it too hard yet).
But, as I said above, if you think it’s plausible that we’ll 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.