“On the margin, it is better for animals to work on the transition to AGI going well, than directly working on AI for animal welfare”
I’m worried everyone will just agree that this seems unlikely. That’s a very high bar.
“AGI which doesn’t cause human extinction or disempowerment will value animal welfare”
I think we don’t care about whether it “values animal welfare”. We care about what happens to animals. There are many very plausible worlds where these two are uncorrelated (just like in ours, where people have never valued AW that high and it has never been that bad for farmed animals, especially the smaller ones).
“Without extra animal-focused work, even aligned superintelligence would be bad for non-human animals”
That’s my favorite version, but I’m worried it invites everyone to just agree on “we should have some extra animal-focused work, anyway” and not red-team each other deeply enough.
So here’s a minimal version I propose: AI safety work that helps humans also helps other animals, to some extent.
(The “to some extent” is optional. I added it to invite people to think about whether AIS helps other animals at all, and not just all agree over the uncontroversial and boring claim that “AIS helps humans more than animals”.)
I like this minimal formulation because
impossible to misinterpret.
it makes clear that the more we lean yes on this, the more AI safety work that helps humans is overall robustly positive, all else equal (e.g., it’d be robust to uncertainty on moral weights, on the expected size of different populations in the future, or on the sign of x-risk reduction). And I think the answer to this question is a crux for some people for (not) supporting AIS work. I feel like none of the versions you propose (or the original version) quite captures this as much as I’d like.
Thanks for asking us, Toby! Looking forward to this debate week :)
I wasn’t sure at first because it seemed so simple—but that formula seems to work really well.
One possible downside is that its simplicity means the audience has to make more inferential leaps themselves to understand what we are getting at with the statement. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing—It’s good if the audience has to be a bit engaged in order to vote.
I’m worried everyone will just agree that this seems unlikely. That’s a very high bar.
I think we don’t care about whether it “values animal welfare”. We care about what happens to animals. There are many very plausible worlds where these two are uncorrelated (just like in ours, where people have never valued AW that high and it has never been that bad for farmed animals, especially the smaller ones).
That’s my favorite version, but I’m worried it invites everyone to just agree on “we should have some extra animal-focused work, anyway” and not red-team each other deeply enough.
So here’s a minimal version I propose: AI safety work that helps humans also helps other animals, to some extent.
(The “to some extent” is optional. I added it to invite people to think about whether AIS helps other animals at all, and not just all agree over the uncontroversial and boring claim that “AIS helps humans more than animals”.)
I like this minimal formulation because
impossible to misinterpret.
it makes clear that the more we lean yes on this, the more AI safety work that helps humans is overall robustly positive, all else equal (e.g., it’d be robust to uncertainty on moral weights, on the expected size of different populations in the future, or on the sign of x-risk reduction). And I think the answer to this question is a crux for some people for (not) supporting AIS work. I feel like none of the versions you propose (or the original version) quite captures this as much as I’d like.
Thanks for asking us, Toby! Looking forward to this debate week :)
I wasn’t sure at first because it seemed so simple—but that formula seems to work really well.
One possible downside is that its simplicity means the audience has to make more inferential leaps themselves to understand what we are getting at with the statement. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing—It’s good if the audience has to be a bit engaged in order to vote.