Adding to what Other Aidan said, I think it’s a mistake to think of the point on the spectrum from most to least helpful interventions where the real impact crosses from “very slightly helpful” to “very slightly harmful” as especially significant. If intervention A is worth 10,000 units, B is 1 unit, and C is −10 units, the difference between A and B matters much more than between B and C.
Aidan Kankyoku
Karma: 358
Congrats/good luck on soon entering the workforce!
I think OP is a valuable contribution to an ongoing discussion, but I’d encourage you not to update too aggressively on any one post. There are good reasons that some of the most rigorous organizations in the space (CG) have made cage-free a top priority and ex ante you should think it unlikely that they all converged without good reasons– see e.g. @Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment above.
I strongly agree that the animal welfare implications of AI should be owned at least as much by the AI safety space as by the animal welfare space, not that there needs to be a hard distinction between the two but there is obviously some declarative truth to it. Animal suffering is among the greatest lock-in risks.
I’m worried that many people outside the AW space believe the end of factory farming is a foregone conclusion. At one forum in SF in February mixing leaders from AI safety and AW, many AIS folks came away at least partly convinced by the AW folks that this cannot be taken for granted. AIS needs to take seriously the inside view of AW leaders that AI will not necessarily solve FAW by default, not to mention WAW.
Fair, the semantics of “going well” ultimately don’t matter so I think this is clear.
Most animals are wild animals, so the answer to this question should focus on them.
I can imagine a future where most animals are farmed animals. I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but if humans spread to other planets, I think we’re more likely to take factory farming with us than take nature with us. Farmed animals should be part of this convo.
From @Tristan Katz :
Does WAW dwarf FAW in expectation? Or is FAW still important to consider in this discussion?
I can imagine a future where most animals are farmed animals. I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but if humans spread to other planets, I think we’re more likely to take factory farming with us than take nature with us. Farmed animals should be part of this convo imo.
How am I supposed to predict whether the solution will be good for animals if I have no idea what that solution will look like?
That about sums it up haha.
I find this compelling, if discouraging.
I’m curious about this choice:
I will assume that “going well” for animals means something like “the ratio of positive experiences to negative experiences among animals is both meaningfully higher than it is today, and is above 1 (i.e. net positive)”.
I agree that animal experience is below 1 right now. I don’t actually think that a continuation of the status quo is possible; for reasons explained by Ian Morris, I think we either see massive growth or some form of collapse.
That aside, though, crossing 1 seems like a slightly unfair threshold. If the current ratio is massively negative, would you stand by reducing it to something close to but below 1 not being “AGI went well for animals”?
This post is persuasive overall and caused me to update negatively on the debate motion.
I don’t think this is load-bearing but this sentence:
However, it is not the number of animals that matters here, but the scale of humans’ impact on them.
I’m not certain about this distinction. Humans increasing or decreasing the number might be the largest impact, and at the same time, this seems to me to imply a greater concern for anthropogenic harm than non-anthropogenic harm. Is that what you meant?
Very cool to see this modelled!
They’re animal activists from across the spectrum from EA-aligned to EA-skeptical.
I think it 70% likely will go well for animals, but that’s not enough to obviate the need for animal-specific alignment efforts. Full take: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/skdp9uB4AoyN2fnuu/animal-welfare-is-just-part-of-ai-alignment-now-and-both
Animal Welfare is Just Part of AI Alignment Now
They are clearly different but Ben’s point is interesting because historically, the movement for political lesbianism treated sexual orientation like meat craving.
Would you say your skepticism is mainly tied into the specific framing of “offsetting” as opposed to just donating? How would your answer change if the offset framing was dropped and it was just a plain donation ask?
I was surprised (and I assume Farmkind was too) that the Rethink survey found specifically contrasting donations against diet change didn’t have any positive effect. If that pans out in the real world and the Veganuary offsetting campaign doesn’t have better results than Farmkind’s normal donation asks, I wonder how different it would seem to folks to just have an identity around donating as “membership” in the movement, similar to the NRA, Sierra Club, and other mass membership movement organizations.
Oh, also, the idea that a 10% threshold for vegetarianism might be enough to shift to stigmatizing meat is super intriguing! I could see that backfiring without much obvious (to me) benefit and I’d love to hear more about your reasoning there.
I agree with all your points, except the one about abandoning veganism as an identity. I used to agree with this point, too. What moved me is the fact that veganism as an identity is a massive, organic phenomenon that isn’t going away– at 2% of the US, we should expect around 7 million vegans who don’t care a spec whether the formal/organized part of the movement decide to jettison veganism.
I argue that this organic spread of veganism is the only part of animal advocacy that deserves to be called a “movement,” and that we should think hard about how to make the most of that phenomenon, which is clearly tapping into something about how people work– very few cultural movements come close to 2% of the population, especially those that require as much sacrifice as veganism!
I have observed the same sharp distinction as @ElliotTep: EAs not focused on animal welfare accept that TAI will end factory farming with something like Matt Reardon’s 99% certainty, while most focused on animal welfare (myself included) feel the risk of factory farming being perpetuated into the future is unacceptably high. This is probably a mix of several factors:
Animal welfare people having some bias to think our work is still important
Animal welfare people having a lower threshold for unacceptably high risk of this particular outcome
EAs outside animal welfare having less firsthand experience of frustration at the ways humans today seem to favor meat from tortured animals over cultivated meat
Animal welfare people having thought less about what extremely weird posthuman futures look like and how strongly TAI might pull in that direction
EAs outside animal welfare being overly confident about the extremely weird posthuman future
I’m focused on animal welfare and have been for 12 years. But I’ve also read my Greg Egan and think it is less likely than not that biological humans will continue to exist into the far future. But I still believe that ensuring AI ends factory farming rather than perpetuating it should be a top focus area for EA. I might try to think through this and write something better, but off the cuff reasons:
It’s possible biological substrates are necessary for consciousness/sentience. My credence on this is maybe 15% which I consider very low given our cluelessness about consciousness. If silicon platforms can’t support consciousness, then Von Neumann probes will probably carry gene sequences to other planets to seed biological civilizations. Low probabilities of galaxy-scale factory farming still look very important!
Maybe the weird posthuman future will get the rest of the lightcone and leave earth for biologicals. In that case it could be a thousand years before digital minds colonize the nearest star system. That’s a lot of time where factory farming could still represent a share of conscious experience within an order of magnitude of today’s. Any model that discounts future beings even just due to uncertainty about our ability to affect their welfare seems likely to make factory farming remain a top priority.