Organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.
I appreciate you championing this view Vasco, despite all the pushback. I found your reasoning pretty convincing, and it seems to me like if it’s wrong, it will be because of more general philosophical problems with utilitarianism or expected value reasoning.
It doesn’t seem to me like AI could radically change the economics of higher welfare products / alternative proteins without other broader transformative effects, or at least if it does, it seems like it would be for a pretty brief period of time before things get very weird. So I think “past X years” ( to use the framework of your comments) there should be heavy discounting and I wouldn’t recommend a save and invest strategy. So to address your four types of interventions:
Short-term, large payoff interventions are going to look good under any model of the world, I’d go further and suggest short-term, small/medium payoff interventions may start to look better.
Interventions actively seeking to navigate and benefit animals through an AI transition—I’m skeptical of tractability here, but I’m supportive of the general idea
Interventions that robustly invest in movement capacity—I would think that short timelines actually push us against capacity building on the margin, curious what you meant here
Interventions that seem unlikely to change through an AI transition—again skeptical of the tractability, but I support the general idea