I am a co-founder of ONEI, an organisation dedicated to informing decision-making about insect farming in France.
I also perform research for several Effective Altruism organisations.
Corentin D. Biteau đ¸
Karma: 213
Hello, good question!
The effects were not accounted for in our post. From what I have seen, the effects on wild animals are very complicated to estimate. Right now, we are not even certain whether their lives contain more suffering or happiness. Organisations working on the topic are still doing research to really understand how to evaluate animal welfare while looking at the global ecosystem.
The effects of climate change lead to difficult-to-estimate consequences because extreme events and changes tend to favour smaller adaptative animals, which reproduce very quickly, rather than larger animals like big mammals, leading to large changes in population dynamics.More research is needed on that front: supporting research on wild animals is a viable option in this context.
EffecÂtive EcolÂogyâAn InÂtroÂducÂtion (EA France)
InÂsect farmÂing: New meÂdia covÂerÂage on the hidÂden challenges of the sector
This is a very thoughtful comment, which I appreciate. Such cultural shifts arenât taken enough into account usually.
That said, I agree with @Holly_Elmore comment, that this approach is more risky if artificial sentience has overall negative livesâsomething we really donât have enough good information on.
Once powerful AIs are widely used everywhere, it will be much harder to backtrack if it turns out that they donât have good lives (same for factory farming today).
For reference, I attended the workshop, and found it useful đ
Itâs nice to have a place to train to get better at communicating.
What we gathered so far is that several scientific papers mention this topic, as well as several large members of the industry itself, which consider it to be important, although there is limited data to inform with a high degree of certainty how to properly inform adequate decision-making on this topic.
For this reason, and since we have limited expertise on this topic, this is currently beyond what we will write about.
Thanks a lot!
Thank you again for everything!
This is a useful complement, thanks!
Providing these numbers puts things into perspective.
The goal of this post was initially to suggest impactful actions for people already interested in the environment. However, you are definitely right to offer a comparison with other cause areas. This is very useful information for people who are cause-agnostic.