Thanks for the detailed and informative post. My response is a bit critical, but I mean it constructively:
After reading the title of the post, I was hopeful to hear about the potential ways that AI could be used to reduce wild animal suffering—and so a bit disappointed to see this only as a minor consideration in section 8.3. Give that it is wild animals that we are concerned about here (not just removing our guilt), surely we should be looking at their lives as a whole, not just how we affect them directly. So when we look at something like wind turbines, we shouldn’t just be interested in how many birds are killed by them—we should be interested in how this changes the lives of such wild birds in general (including those that don’t get killed, and now have greater access to food or habitat).
My own opinion is that your consideration in 8.3 “HWC deaths may be less painful than counterfactual deaths” could very well be correct. There seems to be no good reason for thinking that it is incorrect. Therefore, to advocate for these solutions to HWC seems to be a very non-ideal way at improving WAW. Given the uncertainty here, it seems that we should focus not on reducing the deaths that we cause, but rather on reducing the most painful kinds of deaths. These are unlikely to be from things such as wind turbines—and much more likely to be from disease, starvation etc. I think this needs to be the central focus of the discussion.
Those are very fair concerns. I tend to think that in the very nascent WAW field tractability is such a big issue that focusing only on the most painful deaths of wild animals leaves us with few (if any?) tractable things to do. Until we gain greater knowledge of what to do, there is value in some WAW resources going towards trying out things that look more tractable. In the specific cases in this report, much of the value is coming from establishing the norm around acting on wild animal welfare in human-wildlife conflict, especially in an area where we can get buy-in from non-EA stakeholders at the ground level of a technology that might affect the larger sources of suffering that we do care more about.
On counterfactually more painful deaths, even if the counterfactual death is more painful, this of course needs to be weighed against the fact that the birds would have died later and so the birds get to enjoy more life. In terms of how birds fare as a result of not being killed by windmills, it is fair that the report could have more explicitly acknowledged uncertainty about this, but this uncertainty cuts both ways since the value of living longer is tied to one’s assumptions about the suffering-v-pleasure in wild animal welfare which could be very optimistic or pessimistic.
Hi, sorry I somehow missed this until just now—far too late! Still I feel I need to say that I think you’ve missed the point. With windmills it is not necessarily the case that the average bird will live a shorter life. If some birds are killed by windmills, then others will have more to eat or will have more habitat (whatever factor it is that otherwise limits this bird population) and will then succumb to that death later. Or perhaps with windmills their main predator will just scavenge on the dead birds, rather than predating them. The point is, there is no reason to assume that the average life will be shorter—either way, some factors are limiting the population, and without directly comparing them we just cannot make this claim.
Establishing a norm of caring about wild animals is good, but it seems to me that you are only encouraging people to care about human-caused harms, rather than the welfare of wild animals generally. There is a risk that people only care about the dirtiness of their own hands, rather than the animals themselves.
Thanks for the detailed and informative post. My response is a bit critical, but I mean it constructively:
After reading the title of the post, I was hopeful to hear about the potential ways that AI could be used to reduce wild animal suffering—and so a bit disappointed to see this only as a minor consideration in section 8.3. Give that it is wild animals that we are concerned about here (not just removing our guilt), surely we should be looking at their lives as a whole, not just how we affect them directly. So when we look at something like wind turbines, we shouldn’t just be interested in how many birds are killed by them—we should be interested in how this changes the lives of such wild birds in general (including those that don’t get killed, and now have greater access to food or habitat).
My own opinion is that your consideration in 8.3 “HWC deaths may be less painful than counterfactual deaths” could very well be correct. There seems to be no good reason for thinking that it is incorrect. Therefore, to advocate for these solutions to HWC seems to be a very non-ideal way at improving WAW. Given the uncertainty here, it seems that we should focus not on reducing the deaths that we cause, but rather on reducing the most painful kinds of deaths. These are unlikely to be from things such as wind turbines—and much more likely to be from disease, starvation etc. I think this needs to be the central focus of the discussion.
Thanks for engaging with the report. I’ll offer a response since Tapinder’s summer fellowship has ended and I was her manager during the project.
Firstly, as a response to both you and Max.
Those are very fair concerns. I tend to think that in the very nascent WAW field tractability is such a big issue that focusing only on the most painful deaths of wild animals leaves us with few (if any?) tractable things to do. Until we gain greater knowledge of what to do, there is value in some WAW resources going towards trying out things that look more tractable. In the specific cases in this report, much of the value is coming from establishing the norm around acting on wild animal welfare in human-wildlife conflict, especially in an area where we can get buy-in from non-EA stakeholders at the ground level of a technology that might affect the larger sources of suffering that we do care more about.
On counterfactually more painful deaths, even if the counterfactual death is more painful, this of course needs to be weighed against the fact that the birds would have died later and so the birds get to enjoy more life. In terms of how birds fare as a result of not being killed by windmills, it is fair that the report could have more explicitly acknowledged uncertainty about this, but this uncertainty cuts both ways since the value of living longer is tied to one’s assumptions about the suffering-v-pleasure in wild animal welfare which could be very optimistic or pessimistic.
Hi, sorry I somehow missed this until just now—far too late! Still I feel I need to say that I think you’ve missed the point. With windmills it is not necessarily the case that the average bird will live a shorter life. If some birds are killed by windmills, then others will have more to eat or will have more habitat (whatever factor it is that otherwise limits this bird population) and will then succumb to that death later. Or perhaps with windmills their main predator will just scavenge on the dead birds, rather than predating them. The point is, there is no reason to assume that the average life will be shorter—either way, some factors are limiting the population, and without directly comparing them we just cannot make this claim.
Establishing a norm of caring about wild animals is good, but it seems to me that you are only encouraging people to care about human-caused harms, rather than the welfare of wild animals generally. There is a risk that people only care about the dirtiness of their own hands, rather than the animals themselves.
I hope that makes sense.