A couplet different potential mechanisms could help farmed animals:
Solving cultivated meat or brainless animals
Creating better welfare technologies (e.g. solving all disease issues on current farms)
Generating enough societal wealth to make welfare improvements like lowering stocking density trivial
More abstractly, people generally care about welfare so it will be one of the things that an aligned AGI optimizes for. However, it wont be optimal for animals because AGI won’t be directly optimizing for welfare. For example, most people don’t think it’s wrong to eat meat, and we might still not want do things like beneficial vaccines or genetic edits.
Wild animals, less clear though!
I don’t understand why you (and Ben / Lizka) think we shouldn’t focus on farmed animals in a post-TAI world, can you explain a little more?
It seems to me that regardless of how weird the world gets (which I’m on board with), if AGI is aligned, then humans will still be around. And if the post-TAI humans are mostly the same as the pre-TAI humans, what makes you confident that they wouldn’t want meat from farmed animals?
Looking at current human preferences around animal products, there’s a strong “naturalistic” push—people want their animal products to come from environments that are as “natural” as possible (e.g. outdoor access, no hormones or antibiotics, etc). It seems like lots of people think cultivated meat is weird and gross, and could feel the same way about any other kind of technology that looks significantly different than traditional animal production. Perhaps TAI will be able to convince people to not feel this way, but it seems just as likely to me that this preference will be amplified and animal protein production will look more similar to the current day than you’re anticipating.
You call out the excerpt about the political pushback to cultivated meat, and I agree with you that this probably isn’t what will cause cultivated meat to fail post-TAI. More likely in my mind is that people won’t want cultivated meat (as evidenced by the fact that they currently don’t want it), or any other super tech-y seeming solution to protein production. So it seems to me that thinking about what farming might look like post-TAI at least deserves a spot on the list of possible strategies for for having positive impact on animals in light of ASI.