Alistair Stewart

Karma: 510

My career goal is to prevent, reduce and alleviate the most intense forms of suffering, with a focus on the intersection of powerful AI and sentient nonhumans (biological and artificial).

Interested in:

* Sentience- & suffering-focused ethics; sentientism; painism; s-risks
* Animal ethics & abolitionism
* AI safety & governance
* Activism, direct action & social change

Bio:

* From London
* BA in linguistics at the University of Cambridge, 2014-17
* Almost five years in the British Army as an officer, 2018-22
* MSc in global governance and ethics at University College London, 2022-23
* One year working full time in environmental campaigning and animal rights activism at Plant-Based Universities / Animal Rising, 2023-24
* Lead organiser of AI, Animals, & Digital Minds 2025 in London

* Co-organised Sentient Futures Summit London 2026
* Since Nov 2025, working on fundraising and community coordination at the Center for Reducing Suffering

Alistair Stewart 11 Jun 2026 0:10 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Time Sensitive: Stop One of Biggest Threats for Animal Welfare
I emailed my senators last month and again just now to keep SOB out of the Farm Bill. This piece by Sentient seems like good news (he says cautiously).
Thanks Becca and everyone else for your work on this. Was moved to act again by Dwarkesh’s tweet about SOB here.

Alistair Stewart 27 Apr 2026 20:31 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Celebrating Benjamin Lay (died on this day 265 years ago)
Really love this Lizka!

Alistair Stewart 27 Apr 2026 14:47 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: MHR🔸’s comment on: MHR’s Quick takes
I think that to some extent you’re proposing smashing the “defect” button in a prisoner’s dilemma and hoping the other side doesn’t do the same.
I’ve been pondering this. I think your button-smashing characterisation is basically accurate, and it is a leap of faith that those who engage in civil disobedience make: an appeal to the conscience of society, the jury etc..
You’re right to say that one way to think about universalisability is “if it’s okay for me to break the law to achieve what I consider to be a moral goal here, why can’t everyone break the law to achieve their own moral goals?”. But another way to think about universalisability is to go “if I were the one in Ridglan / Unit 731 / Willowbrook, what actions would I support to end my suffering?”
I don’t know whether it would be illegal for parents to break their children out of Willowbrook, but for the purposes of this question assume it was.

Alistair Stewart 25 Apr 2026 0:24 UTC
23 points
8 ∶ 1
in reply to: MHR🔸’s comment on: MHR’s Quick takes
What if “protecting innocent sentient beings from torture” is a higher moral priority than “living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views”?
I’m sceptical that the distinction between flawed democracy and dictatorship is clean enough to justify civil disobedience on behalf of others only in the latter (if this is what you’re saying). Would you support rescuing American children from deliberate infection with hepatitis at Willowbrook in the 1960s?

Alistair Stewart 24 Apr 2026 14:18 UTC
22 points
9 ∶ 0
in reply to: MHR🔸’s comment on: MHR’s Quick takes
The clearest such historical cases are ones where a disenfranchised group of people broke laws that directly enforced their own exclusion from political participation or basic legal personhood. These cases are self-limiting (and thus pass reasonable tests of universalizability) since the principles justifying such lawbreaking achieve their own obsolescence once participation is granted.
I worry this approach excludes the most vulnerable (those who cannot meaningfully participate in political life, like human babies and animals), and focuses on less fundamental rights: I think protection from torture is more urgent than legal personhood.
Why would women be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to get the vote for themselves, but not be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to rescue babies from Josef Mengele?

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 18:56 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
Thanks for organising Toby!

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 18:20 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jo_🔸’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
I guess the causal mechanism I’m thinking of here is:
1. Most humans feel at least a little sad when they see a baby gazelle being eaten alive by hyenas
2. AGI is so powerful that humans can order it to do things like “stop baby gazelles being eaten alive whilst retaining the beauty of nature and the complexity of ecosystems” and then it’ll just go away and do it somehow
Maybe this is foolish and naive on my part! And maybe I’m wrong to think our moral preferences/intuitions will be so robust to the disruption of AGI, even if AGI goes well for us.

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 18:08 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lee Wall’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
Some really cool points here Lee, and I mostly agree with you I think.
Crux: how many actors have terminal preferences for suffering? agency may be amplified for animal advocates, but it could also be amplified for malevolent actors.
This could be very important. I’m not sure what it means for AGI to go well for humans if some of those humans have terminal preferences for suffering / are sadistic. If the AGI protects the rest of us from the sadists, is AGI going well for the sadists?
EDIT: as well as sadists, we can consider humans who think animal agriculture, testing etc. has enough aesthetic/historical/cultural value that it’s worth continuing to do it in a post-AGI world of abundance.

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 17:54 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
I need to think about b) more. I see arguments in both directions.
I don’t think I can properly imagine what it’s like to be tortured or eaten alive, and yet the thought of each happening to me or someone else makes me feel some combination of horror, fear, upset and compassion. And the idea of suffering more intense than torture or being eaten alive (if future artificially sentient beings have wider welfare ranges than we do) is terrifying to me.
But if I could never suffer worse than a pinprick, maybe I would stop caring about the most intense forms of suffering. Concerning stuff.

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 17:48 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jo_🔸’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
What kinds of values will humans have post-AGI, if AGI goes well for us? We don’t need to be scope-sensitive utilitarians to want to adopt even radical preferences like ending animal exploitation and solving WAS, no? (Most humans don’t like factory farming or the idea of cute animals being eaten alive.)

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 17:44 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
This makes sense. I would worry about the purely corrigible AGI being used by actors in such a way that we never get to instil the correct/good/post-long-reflection values in AGI/ASI down the line.

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 17:40 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
I should have sketched this out more.
In my view, AGI going well for humans should see:
1. Intense (and perhaps even moderate) human suffering eradicated
2. Probably, humans remaining empowered
  1. Probably, our species isn’t disempowered by AGI; and
  2. Probably, there isn’t severe inter-human inequality, specifically inequality of power; we don’t have a political elite determining how all other human lives go
Some kind of AGI technological innovation will be able to do 1); not clear to me how we get to 2), as we’ll probably need some kind of political pro-democracy innovation (I don’t think our existing political institutions will get us there).
What this world actually looks like, feels like, is very unclear to me! But if we do both those things, it seems more likely than not that we humans will both want and be able to help animals by abolishing animal exploitation and solving wild animal suffering.

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 17:29 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
Toby, would you be more optimistic for animals if we can align AGI to specific values rather than just making it corrigible to humans’ preferences and commands?
My impression is that pro-animal views are (dramatically?) overrepresented at Anthropic relative to the rest of society. If Anthropic gets to AGI first and instils/locks in pro-animal values in/to that AGI, that seems better for animals than if whoever gets to AGI first just makes it purely corrigible, because most humans who operate the purely corrigible AGI won’t be as pro-animal.

Alistair Stewart 26 Mar 2026 17:10 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AGI & Animals Symposium (Thursday 5-7pm UK)
My position statement (50% agree with the statement “If AGI goes well for humans, it’ll go well for animals”)
- As a suffering-focused ethicist who generally rejects moral aggregation across individuals (I am most sympathetic to painism), I have a higher bar for “AGI going well for humans” for humans than many others do; it’s not clear to me that previous technological advances went well for humans
  - Agricultural revolution’s “luxury trap”: going from hunting-gathering to farming allowed humans to consolidate unprecedented wealth and power, but at the cost of the wellbeing/welfare/rights of very many humans
  - Perhaps similar arguments can be made for the industrial and digital revolutions
  - Even AGI Omelas is not an instance of AGI going well
- “AGI going well” necessarily leaves many humans the stated preference to help animals (which might look like “abolishing animal exploitation and solving wild animal suffering”), and it certainly gives us the means and opportunity to do so
- I happen to think that AGI going well for humans is unlikely, even by the lights of someone who is more upside-focused
  - We’re on track for creating something that is more intelligent than us (better at understanding the world and achieving goals within it) – and probably something with awareness, autonomy, agency, and the capacity for recursive self-improvement and self-replication – without understanding how it works, how to make it do what we want, or what it is we even want it to do
- So, between normative and empirical claims, I believe a world in which AGI goes well for humans is a very small fraction of the possibility space
- And when I try to think about what this AGI-going-well-for-humans world looks like, mostly I don’t really know, but it seems likely that in this world:
  - We retain and develop our moral wisdom (the most fundamental tenet of which is plausibly “non-maleficence and compassion towards all sentient beings”)
  - And we have the means to enact this moral wisdom
  - So, we abolish animal exploitation and solve wild animal suffering
  - Thus, AGI goes well for animals as well as humans!

Alistair Stewart 24 Mar 2026 17:12 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AGI & Animals: Discussion Thread
My position statement
- As a suffering-focused ethicist who generally rejects moral aggregation across individuals (I am most sympathetic to painism), I have a higher bar for “AGI going well for humans” for humans than many others do; it’s not clear to me that previous technological advances went well for humans
  - Agricultural revolution’s “luxury trap”: going from hunting-gathering to farming allowed humans to consolidate unprecedented wealth and power, but at the cost of the wellbeing/welfare/rights of very many humans
  - Perhaps similar arguments can be made for the industrial and digital revolutions
  - Even AGI Omelas is not an instance of AGI going well
- “AGI going well” necessarily leaves many humans the stated preference to help animals (e.g. abolishing animal exploitation and solving wild animal suffering), and it certainly gives us the means and opportunity to do so
- I happen to think that AGI going well for humans is unlikely, even by the lights of someone who is more upside-focused
  - We’re on track for creating something that is more intelligent than us (better at understanding the world and achieving goals within it) – and probably something with awareness, autonomy, agency, and the capacity for recursive self-improvement and self-replication – without understanding how it works, how to make it do what we want, or what it is we even want it to do
- So, between normative and empirical claims, I believe a world in which AGI goes well for humans is a very small fraction of the possibility space
- And when I try to think about what this AGI-going-well-for-humans world looks like, mostly I don’t really know, but it seems likely that in this world:
  - We retain and develop our moral wisdom (the most fundamental tenet of which is plausibly “non-maleficence and compassion towards all sentient beings”)
  - And we have the means to enact this moral wisdom
  - So, we abolish animal exploitation and solve wild animal suffering
  - Thus, AGI goes well for animals as well as humans!

Alistair Stewart 26 Feb 2026 1:30 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: What Success Looks Like For Animals
Cool piece Jess, thanks for writing. :)

Is EA sleeping on making dogs and cats vegan?

Alistair Stewart20 Feb 2026 4:48 UTC

47 points

23 comments1 min readEA link

Alistair Stewart 26 Jan 2026 17:32 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
on: How I’m thinking about the next 3 years
Extremely interesting and valuable piece Niki, thank you!

Alistair Stewart 15 Jan 2026 0:58 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Should animal advocates treat veganism as a supererogatory commitment or a moral baseline?
For veganism:
1. To me, veganism seems like a moral obligation in the same way that not torturing puppies for chocolate seems like a moral obligation
2. Veganism is a costly signal that is important for movement-building and motivating animal advocates
3. Seems intuitive and plausible to me that there is some kind of social tipping point for veganism, where you go slowly from 1 to 25% of the population being vegan, then quickly from 25 to 99%
Against veganism:
1. It makes entry to the animal movement demanding, perhaps unnecessarily and growth-stuntingly so: “[the animal movement] is one of the only social justice causes whose point of entry is entirely negotiated by real, quantifiable, fundamental behavior change [veganism].” Source
2. Perhaps social tipping points are overrated
I tend to want a big, diverse animal movement with people trying different approaches –from “holding non-vegans accountable”-style vegan outreach, to FarmKind’s offsetting approach (minus their criticism of Veganuary/veganism). That diversity will appeal to different audiences and bring in different resources (allies, committed activists, money, political attention). The diversity does trade off against movement unity, though, but I think it’s worth it if we learn from experimenting and retain some level of movement solidarity.

Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 22:32 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Should animal advocates treat veganism as a supererogatory commitment or a moral baseline?
Nice, got it.
If we’re going to promote offsetting, I reckon these kinds of considerations will not be interesting to the vast majority of the target audience, and they wouldn’t expect to have them explained. Just do the maths, taking into account positives avoided as well as negatives caused, and tell people how much they need to donate to offset those impacts of their non-veganism.
(I say this as someone who is pretty sceptical of offsetting non-veganism, for both moral/deontologically-flavoured reasons and strategic/consequentialist ones.)

Alistair Stewart

Is EA sleep­ing on mak­ing dogs and cats ve­gan?

Is EA sleeping on making dogs and cats vegan?