Somewhat neutral, though I concur that animal welfare is more neglected and that a straightforward shortterm calculation is on the animal welfare side. However:
With AI, ensuring longevity for many people may be a better use, though I’m uncertain about the exact costs. Animals are more interchangeable than humans, and will die within not that long regardless, which means that ensuring more humans live longer lives is more valuable. The more people that live longer, the more that are able to participate in a possible longevity escape velocity. (Theoretically one could argue for lengthening the lives of many animals, but most animals are unlikely to live for long enough and will take longer to be given life extending medications)
This makes me view the calculus as significantly more balanced, or potentially weighted on global health significantly. If we can ensure that more people survive, then that ensures a lot of positive utility.
I don’t think whether animals or humans are interchangeable (within each group) is the right question. If a human dies and another human is born, the latter does not replace the former in terms of their unique characteristics as an individual, their relationships, etc. But they both have lives worth living, and I don’t think it’s obviously the case that one long life is better than two half-long lives—sure, there are some advantages to longer lives in terms of accumulation of knowledge, memories, relationships etc, but I think these effects are relatively minor among reasons why a life is good or rich or well-lived (e.g. I think children have rich and valuable lives—although they miss some things about the adult experience, it’s not so much to make them dramatically different).
If a human dies and we have a lot of humans very very similar to them, I think it is plausible that we’ve lost less. Still a negative, but not as much of one. (Which is one answer that I favor to the repugnant conclusion, you can’t just add new people indefinitely). I also think this makes more sense for societies that can freely copy minds.
For animals my logic was much the same, but that there’s less variation/uniqueness that is lost because (for example) chicken minds have less axes on which they vary notably.
Here’s another argument:
I think the “one long life vs two half-long lives” is a good example, but that it matters how long they live. Better to have a parrot that lives for a year rather than two parrots that live for six months. The parrot has more opportunity to learn and build on what it has learned and gets more value out of living for longer. A chicken wouldn’t have as much value because it has stronger limits on what it can learn, be curious about, enjoy, and so on. But a parrot that lives 50 years vs two that live 25? I would lean towards two.
I disagree about how much children miss from adult lives, though it depends on how young we’re calling children. Children are certainly very valuable, but I do think they miss out on a lot of adult experiences. The problems they solve are less intricate, the understanding of complex joys is significantly weaker (a child playing with toys vs. reading a 150k word book), and so on. But I don’t know where I’d do the tradeoff precisely. I think part of the value of children, beyond being a good in-of-themselves, is that they will grow up to be adults which have richer more vibrant and varied experiences.
However, I don’t think that matters much here. I don’t believe that the longevity we manage to acquire is merely one long life vs. two half-lives. It is more of a “one ten century long human life vs. (tens of? (hundreds of?)) thousands of various animals living a couple years more”. I think the human has a lot of space to continue learning, growing, and experiencing that many animals unfortunately saturate. (Of course their happiness+lack-of-suffering+other positive emotions matters significantly as well)
Then there’s also the factor that paired with the fantastical technology that would allow life extension, many other ills of humanity will be pushed back. If a person isn’t interchangeable at all (plausible), then ensuring that they survive means they’ll experience all these wonders. Rather than letting many animals live for a few more years in happiness (a good thing!), you get X amount of people who are able to go on to live in a world closer to a utopia.
As I said previously, I find the animal welfare being far more neglected and more important than current human welfare to be probably true. However, I think comparing Animal Welfare vs. Global Health ignores that EA has areas of thought which indicate that Global Health isn’t considering certain factors, like longevity meaning more people get to live in a better and better world where we may have solved aging. Most charities are operating under a ‘everything continues as normal’ paradigm, which gives EA an advantage here.
Part of what makes me uncertain and which would make Animal Welfare more of an obvious choice is that Global Health might already be putting a lot into longevity. I suspect they aren’t, given general ignorance of cryo, but they’re tackling many things that correlate with it, which would still tilt the calculation in the favor of Animal Welfare.
Somewhat neutral, though I concur that animal welfare is more neglected and that a straightforward shortterm calculation is on the animal welfare side. However:
With AI, ensuring longevity for many people may be a better use, though I’m uncertain about the exact costs. Animals are more interchangeable than humans, and will die within not that long regardless, which means that ensuring more humans live longer lives is more valuable. The more people that live longer, the more that are able to participate in a possible longevity escape velocity. (Theoretically one could argue for lengthening the lives of many animals, but most animals are unlikely to live for long enough and will take longer to be given life extending medications)
This makes me view the calculus as significantly more balanced, or potentially weighted on global health significantly. If we can ensure that more people survive, then that ensures a lot of positive utility.
I don’t think whether animals or humans are interchangeable (within each group) is the right question. If a human dies and another human is born, the latter does not replace the former in terms of their unique characteristics as an individual, their relationships, etc. But they both have lives worth living, and I don’t think it’s obviously the case that one long life is better than two half-long lives—sure, there are some advantages to longer lives in terms of accumulation of knowledge, memories, relationships etc, but I think these effects are relatively minor among reasons why a life is good or rich or well-lived (e.g. I think children have rich and valuable lives—although they miss some things about the adult experience, it’s not so much to make them dramatically different).
If a human dies and we have a lot of humans very very similar to them, I think it is plausible that we’ve lost less. Still a negative, but not as much of one. (Which is one answer that I favor to the repugnant conclusion, you can’t just add new people indefinitely). I also think this makes more sense for societies that can freely copy minds.
For animals my logic was much the same, but that there’s less variation/uniqueness that is lost because (for example) chicken minds have less axes on which they vary notably.
Here’s another argument:
I think the “one long life vs two half-long lives” is a good example, but that it matters how long they live. Better to have a parrot that lives for a year rather than two parrots that live for six months. The parrot has more opportunity to learn and build on what it has learned and gets more value out of living for longer. A chicken wouldn’t have as much value because it has stronger limits on what it can learn, be curious about, enjoy, and so on. But a parrot that lives 50 years vs two that live 25? I would lean towards two.
I disagree about how much children miss from adult lives, though it depends on how young we’re calling children. Children are certainly very valuable, but I do think they miss out on a lot of adult experiences. The problems they solve are less intricate, the understanding of complex joys is significantly weaker (a child playing with toys vs. reading a 150k word book), and so on. But I don’t know where I’d do the tradeoff precisely. I think part of the value of children, beyond being a good in-of-themselves, is that they will grow up to be adults which have richer more vibrant and varied experiences.
However, I don’t think that matters much here. I don’t believe that the longevity we manage to acquire is merely one long life vs. two half-lives. It is more of a “one ten century long human life vs. (tens of? (hundreds of?)) thousands of various animals living a couple years more”. I think the human has a lot of space to continue learning, growing, and experiencing that many animals unfortunately saturate. (Of course their happiness+lack-of-suffering+other positive emotions matters significantly as well)
Then there’s also the factor that paired with the fantastical technology that would allow life extension, many other ills of humanity will be pushed back. If a person isn’t interchangeable at all (plausible), then ensuring that they survive means they’ll experience all these wonders. Rather than letting many animals live for a few more years in happiness (a good thing!), you get X amount of people who are able to go on to live in a world closer to a utopia.
As I said previously, I find the animal welfare being far more neglected and more important than current human welfare to be probably true. However, I think comparing Animal Welfare vs. Global Health ignores that EA has areas of thought which indicate that Global Health isn’t considering certain factors, like longevity meaning more people get to live in a better and better world where we may have solved aging. Most charities are operating under a ‘everything continues as normal’ paradigm, which gives EA an advantage here.
Part of what makes me uncertain and which would make Animal Welfare more of an obvious choice is that Global Health might already be putting a lot into longevity. I suspect they aren’t, given general ignorance of cryo, but they’re tackling many things that correlate with it, which would still tilt the calculation in the favor of Animal Welfare.