Growing the field’s resources (more of some kinds of labor, or other resources — compute commitments, money, ..?)
My guess is that for the (perhaps rare) person who has short-ish AI timelines (e.g. <10 years median) and cares in particular about animals, investing money to give later is better than donating now. At least, if we buy the claim that the post-AGI future will likely be pretty weird/​wild, and we have a fairly low pure time discount rate, it seems presumptuous to think we will allocate money better now than after we see how things pan out.
And to a (very rough) first approximation, I expect the values of the future to be somewhat in proportion to the wealth/​power of present people. Ie if there are more (and more powerful/​wealthy) pro-animal people, that seems somewhat robustly good for the future of animals. Though not fully robust.
My guess is that for the (perhaps rare) person who has short-ish AI timelines (e.g. <10 years median) and cares in particular about animals, investing money to give later is better than donating now. At least, if we buy the claim that the post-AGI future will likely be pretty weird/​wild, and we have a fairly low pure time discount rate, it seems presumptuous to think we will allocate money better now than after we see how things pan out.
And to a (very rough) first approximation, I expect the values of the future to be somewhat in proportion to the wealth/​power of present people. Ie if there are more (and more powerful/​wealthy) pro-animal people, that seems somewhat robustly good for the future of animals. Though not fully robust.