Hi Charlie. I agree it is better to target soil animals instead of farmed shrimps (at the margin) if individual welfare is proportional to the individual number of neurons as suggested by @William_MacAskill. Hereare my estimates for the total number of neurons of animal populations. I calculate soil nematodes have 5.93 M times as many neurons in total as farmed shrimps.
It is also worth noting that only wild finfishes and soil animals have more neurons in total than humans.
As a fun fact, @Ajeya was early to the potential importance of nematodes. In her biological anchors report about transformative AI (TAI) timelines, she calculated the compute performed by evolution considering just nematodes.
Ajeya estimates 10^41. I [Scott Alexander] can’t believe I’m writing this. I can’t believe someone actually estimated the number of floating point operations involved in jellyfish rising out of the primordial ooze and eventually becoming fish and lizards and mammals and so on all the way to the Ascent of Man. Still, the idea is simple. You estimate how long animals with neurons have been around for (10^16 seconds), total number of animals at any given second (10^20) times average number of FLOPS per animal (10^5) and you can read more here but it comes out to 10^41 FLOs. I would not call this an exact estimate—for one thing, it assumes that all animals are nematodes, on the grounds that non-nematode animals are basically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things [emphasis mine].
more bang for your buck with soil nematodes
Hi Charlie. I agree it is better to target soil animals instead of farmed shrimps (at the margin) if individual welfare is proportional to the individual number of neurons as suggested by @William_MacAskill. Here are my estimates for the total number of neurons of animal populations. I calculate soil nematodes have 5.93 M times as many neurons in total as farmed shrimps.
It is also worth noting that only wild finfishes and soil animals have more neurons in total than humans.
As a fun fact, @Ajeya was early to the potential importance of nematodes. In her biological anchors report about transformative AI (TAI) timelines, she calculated the compute performed by evolution considering just nematodes.