My version of Matt’s critique that you quoted is something like:
Imagine you’re running a mining company, and you want to start mining Venus. You could either embark on a massive terraforming project to make Venus habitable by biological humans who can work in your mining colony, or you could just build a bunch of robots who can naturally withstand Venus’ climate, think faster than a human, make better decisions than a human, etc. etc. What do you do?
Obviously you are going to choose to send the robots, and the robots aren’t going to want to eat meat, so you don’t need to worry about factory farming on Venus.
I don’t think this argument is bulletproof. For example, ports in the U.S. are required to pay human dock workers to sit around and do nothing after their jobs had been automated. I could imagine some sort of analogous regulatory capture in the future which would require mining companies to send humans to other planets even when robots would be more efficient. Preventing this kind of lock-in is one of the few interventions targeting a post-singularity world that I feel positive about.
My version of Matt’s critique that you quoted is something like:
I don’t think this argument is bulletproof. For example, ports in the U.S. are required to pay human dock workers to sit around and do nothing after their jobs had been automated. I could imagine some sort of analogous regulatory capture in the future which would require mining companies to send humans to other planets even when robots would be more efficient. Preventing this kind of lock-in is one of the few interventions targeting a post-singularity world that I feel positive about.