I think the future is not clearly positive if we also consider non-human animals (and digital people and animals). I think realising colonizing the galaxy could be a bad things: For example, by spreading wild animal suffering and factory farming.
Fair enough! I agree with Saulius that digital minds might be much more important than WAW in the future. I see you wrote about why the expected numbers of farmed animals in the far future might be huge. I have only read the summary of your piece (added it to my reading list now), but I agree that “digital people will, presumably, have very few incentive to raise animals for food, or even other purposes”. In addition, I think there are scenarions in which digital beings dominate total utility by many many orders of magnitude (OOMs), whereas I find it hard to imagine wild animal welfare dominating by much more than the current 8 OOMs (roughly my best guess).
Thank you for your reply!
I think the future is not clearly positive if we also consider non-human animals (and digital people and animals). I think realising colonizing the galaxy could be a bad things: For example, by spreading wild animal suffering and factory farming.
Fair enough! I agree with Saulius that digital minds might be much more important than WAW in the future. I see you wrote about why the expected numbers of farmed animals in the far future might be huge. I have only read the summary of your piece (added it to my reading list now), but I agree that “digital people will, presumably, have very few incentive to raise animals for food, or even other purposes”. In addition, I think there are scenarions in which digital beings dominate total utility by many many orders of magnitude (OOMs), whereas I find it hard to imagine wild animal welfare dominating by much more than the current 8 OOMs (roughly my best guess).