Is there much reason for this to be an app as opposed to a website, or an LLM?
[Question] What About Creating an App That Would Answer Any Question Related to Suffering?
Thank you for asking the question. I’m not competent enough to answer with confidence, but here’s how I see things.
Questions we may ask about suffering are countless. A static website could deal with only a tiny fraction of them. I imagine a dynamic website could amount to an app, but don’t we use Google Maps a lot more as an app than the website at https://www.google.com/maps/? As for the LLM, it would be an indispensable part of the envisaged application, but I imagine that the latter would specify the domain of research or discussion and allow the whole subject of suffering to be specifically organized in a more general, complete, and logical way, which would add much to the usefulness of the query for users.
What I have in mind is access, for the first time in history, to a comprehensive body of knowledge on suffering. I hope that an application such as the one proposed could become so popular, both with ordinary people and specialists in various fields of work, that it would help fund a center for the systematic study and control of excessive suffering in the world.
One question that a Universal Application Dealing With Suffering might suggest to a user: “How can I make good use of my suffering to help solve my own suffering and that of others?”.
Great idea! Our efforts with the Welfare Footprint Project aim to provide the most rigorous and comprehensive information possible to support initiatives like this—whether in the form of an app, website, or large language model. By developing tools to systematically quantify and map suffering across species and contexts—and already conducting various analyses in this direction—we hope to contribute the necessary data and frameworks to ensure such a tool is both scientifically robust and impactful.