Currently looking for my next step in animal welfare. Reasonably clueless about what interventions are impartially good.
âWe have enormous opportunity to reduce suffering on behalf of sentient creatures [...], but even if we try our hardest, the future will still look very bleak.ââBrian Tomasik
Solving WAS intuitively seems too niche for people to deliberately change their mind on that, but I could be wrong. After all, the Bible says that the Lion will lie down with the lamb and eat straw like the ox, so it could be that human preferences tend to come back to the idea that animal suffering can be bad even when it doesnât depend on human actions.
I hesitated on how to frame the deep ecology thing, because I think itâs entirely possible that it ends up locked in. I think my thought was something like the following. If AGI gets the values of its builders and then never modifies it, in the current race, itâs unlikely that AGI would lock in deep ecology values: these donât seem massive in Chinese labs (could be wrong), and people in AI labs in the West are not hardcore ecologists, for the most part, because of political divisions.[1]
I do agree that AI systems could populate other worlds with animals for other reasons. Logically, we canât cover all of the reasons why systems that we donât know anything about would do something. The same applies to future humans.
(More broadly, I deliberately under-hedged all of the above. I donât think we have any action-guidance on AGIxAnimals)
Maybe itâs good that environmentalists hate AI so much, because it ensures that people in labs are less likely to be friendly to pro-ecology views?
Agree that these are important and unresolved crucial considerations.
I guess a âmetaâ consideration here is to what extent things that hold in our world hold in a âhuman-friendlyâ post-AGI world. Iâm pessimistic on resolving this, because given that there is absolutely no track record, we should be very uncertain on our answer to that question. Weâll have to wait and see (if we can see), or just have different factions taking different bets: there could be alt protein groups focusing on preventing further bans, and alt protein group building their ToC on the assumption that bans will not matter in a post-AGI world.
Fair pushback!
For P1, I assumed that AGI going well for humans was basically even ASI going well for humans (just: âit happens weâre in a good scenario for the fleshy humansâ). I donât know if ASI is much less likely to go right than AGIâsomething as capable as AGI could already very easily be misaligned and Iâm not sure that scales with increase in capabilities.
For P2, Iâm scared that we donât necessarily need the top of the distribution of ASI to do this. I could imagine non-AGI worlds where human-brain-driven technological progress gets us there, though it seems very complicated resource-wise at this stage.
I agree that these two arguments together could undermine my vague âone order of magnitude differenceâ claim, but Iâm not sure how much I believe them. I do come down to believing that most of my considerations will face counter-considerations which I am currently unaware of.
This is definitely a hard debate to disentangle, because I would personally reject the question of alignment as a crux. For now, I strongly believe that the total welfare of animals has been entirely uncorrelated with our moral intentions toward animals. Total welfare has mostly changed because of land use, due to human interests.
I agree that in AGI-transformed futures that go well for humans, human desires may start playing a larger role. However, I expect that whether we mean well for animals (or donât care much about them) will not be cleanly correlated with outcomes for them.
There are worlds where we mean well for a large part of animals, stop intentionally killing them, and help certain wild animals. But that world could very well end up having a large population of animals living bad lives.
On the other hand, out of apathy and even negative feeling toward wild animals, we may decide to limit their spread and use resources in a way that optimizes for human flourishing, over animal abundance. That world could end up being much better for animal welfare.
Maybe some extreme scenarios tip the scales, for example if we bred incredibly happy genetically modified animals due to positive feelings toward them. But Iâm not confident on putting any weight on such utilitarian-leaning scenarios when assessing post-AGI futures. Because part of the reason human moral intentions are not correlated with total animal welfare is that humans are not scope-sensitive utilitarians.
(Copied from my Symposium position statement)
If I accept conventional assumptions in EA Animal welfare[1], AGI will be negative for animals in expectation. On the other hand, AGI being good for humans makes it worse for animals in expectation. However, both rogue AGI and human-friendly AGI seem positive for animals in most scenarios: it just happens that the âbadâ scenarios seem much worse than the âgoodâ scenario.
Why is that? AGI, whether rogue or human-aligned, may not decide to keep other planets free of biological animals (though it seems like a bigger risk for human-aligned AGI). And EA Animal Welfare advocates generally believe that the likelihood that wild animal welfare is negative makes such spreading of biological animals too risky.
A small chance of this decision being made outweighs the positives. This seems very unlikely with rogue AGI (0.1%, perhaps much less), but it could still dominate the scales in my view. An AGI that is more human-friendly seems at least one order of magnitude more likely to terraform other planets.[2]
That said, this doesnât flip the sign of AI safety work. This judgment is lightly held; digital minds (human-like or animal-like) are a larger portion of welfare patients in expectation; and I have no idea of what the counterfactuals are. Thus, I donât treat this as an action-guiding beliefs.
To caveat, I think terraforming is still relatively unlikely in human-friendly scenarios because biodiversity becomes less instrumentally valuable post-AGI, so memes that would favor the existence of wild animal populations would lose in popularity. Even in human lock-in scenarios, the values that control AGI wonât favor deep ecology.
How about farmed animals? Even in precision Livestock Farmingâs best and worst cases, suffering in factory farms shifts by a few orders of magnitude at most.[3] AGI makes the end of factory farming through developing alternatives more likely, though Iâm more convinced by âbiological food systems become unnecessary or unrecognizableâ than âclean meat winsâ. In the vast majority of scenarios, wild animals would be the most numerous moral patients.[4]
However, again, alien counterfactuals probably messes all of this up. If biological beings from other planets can colonize planets in our sphere of influence, then I have to put myself at 0%.
Farmed animal welfare is negative, wild animal welfare is negative, âgoodâ and âbadâ relate to expected total welfare
Though what that looks like is still underdefined.
However, precision livestock farming offers massive near-term risks and opportunities for farmed animals, and interest in this area appears justified.
Human-friendly AGI could decide to only keep animals under human control, but that would probably not lead to massive animal populations.
My position statement (20% disagree with the statement âIf AGI goes well for humans, itâll go well for animalsâ)[1]
If I accept conventional assumptions in EA Animal welfare[2], AGI will be negative for animals in expectation. On the other hand, AGI being good for humans makes it worse for animals in expectation. However, both rogue AGI and human-friendly AGI seem positive for animals in most scenarios: it just happens that the âbadâ scenarios seem much worse than the âgoodâ scenario.
Why is that? AGI, whether rogue or human-aligned, may not decide to keep other planets free of biological animals (though it seems like a bigger risk for human-aligned AGI). And EA Animal Welfare advocates generally believe that the likelihood that wild animal welfare is negative makes such spreading of biological animals too risky.
A small chance of this decision being made outweighs the positives. This seems very unlikely with rogue AGI (0.1%, perhaps much less), but it could still dominate the scales in my view. An AGI that is more human-friendly seems at least one order of magnitude more likely to terraform other planets.[3]
That said, this doesnât flip the sign of AI safety work. This judgment is lightly held; digital minds (human-like or animal-like) are a larger portion of welfare patients in expectation; and I have no idea of what the counterfactuals are. Thus, I donât treat this as an action-guiding beliefs.
To caveat, I think terraforming is still relatively unlikely in human-friendly scenarios because biodiversity becomes less instrumentally valuable post-AGI, so memes that would favor the existence of wild animal populations would lose in popularity. Even in human lock-in scenarios, the values that control AGI wonât favor deep ecology.
How about farmed animals? Even in precision Livestock Farmingâs best and worst cases, suffering in factory farms shifts by a few orders of magnitude at most.[4] AGI makes the end of factory farming through developing alternatives more likely, though Iâm more convinced by âbiological food systems become unnecessary or unrecognizableâ than âclean meat winsâ. In the vast majority of scenarios, wild animals would be the most numerous moral patients.[5]
Probably 0% on reflection because aliens could count as animals, but itâs less indicative
Farmed animal welfare is negative, wild animal welfare is negative, âgoodâ and âbadâ relate to expected total welfare
Though what that looks like is still underdefined.
However, precision livestock farming offers massive near-term risks and opportunities for farmed animals, and interest in this area appears justified.
Human-friendly AGI could decide to only keep animals under human control, but that would probably not lead to massive animal populations.
Far from a shovel-ready proposal, but you may appreciate this post from three years ago: Corporate campaigns work: a key learning for AI Safety
The first suggestion, âHow to Careâ, reminds me very much of Magnus Vindingâs upcoming book âCompassionate Purposeâ. It should come out this spring, but you can find draft chapters here if you want to see whether thatâs what you had in mind.
Thanks, Vasco, very helpful! Iâve asked myself this question a few times, and I hadnât even considered the cost aspect while doing that. I also expect that there will be some informed considerations in the comments highlighting some counterarguments to this that I havenât considered yet.
I fully agree with that caveat! If âloveâ depends on sentience (not to mention the moral weights we put on top of that), then it seems pretty underdefined (for what itâs worth, I still havenât grasped Tomasikâs strange definition of sentience). I think I enjoy this quote mostly for the fuzzy feels it gives me, less so than for its action-guidance.
âIn my mind, unconditional love is closely tied with utilitarianism: When I realize that an organism feels happiness and suffering, at that point I realize that the organism matters and deserves care and kindness. In this sense, you could say the only âconditionâ of my love is sentience.ââBrian Tomasik
Nicely balanced, well-structured, and link-heavy, as such a post âshouldâ be: well-done![1] Iâm very unlikely to act in this area, but as itâs less mapped-out than some larger areas, I find this helpful, insofar as most intros to the area are theoretical and not focused on prioritizing potential interventions.
My last post attempted to lay similar groundwork for AI x Animals, so Iâm biased toward finding this impressive.
Iâve been thinking about this in vague terms for a while (and have used the analogy a few times in conversations), but it was an entirely different experience to read it an properly written way, with many details I hadnât considered.
Best intuition-pumping exercise Iâve seen in a while!
Have you read Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy ?
I feel like your message implies that the central claim of Forget Veganuary (that focusing on veganism is unhelpful, and that donations are more promising) was not sincerely held by FarmKind /â animal advocates. I strongly disagree.
The view that diet change is not promising has been defended in animal advocacy since the early 90s, by a diversity of leading figures of the movement (Wayne Hsiung, Peter Singer, Yves Bonnardel, Nick Cooney).[1] It simply had never been made into a public campaign. So I donât resonate with the framing of the campaign as bait: on the contrary, it stated out loud a view that many advocates had. (Not saying that getting attention was not part of the campaignâthough itâs part of most campaigns).
To varying degrees, with caveats, etc.
I like this article (maybe mostly because I like Tomasik), though I find it a bit dated, and the twelve years that have passed since then indicate that the thesis is somewhat off (to be fair, I think Tomasik would agree that his evidence is very anecdotal). While the popularity of wilderness preservation in the mainstream has grown since then, it seems that large fractions of the animal rights /â welfare movement has been pretty distant from it. Anti-wilderness-preservation views have been endorsed by some of the main animal rights influencers: James Aspey, Die Militante Veganerin, Gary Yourofsky (to varying extents: I think Gary Yourofsky finds nature bloody and somewhat horrific, but Iâm not sure that heâs explicitly anti-wilderness preservation, but the first two are clearer on it).
Meanwhile, in animal welfare (at least the EA-leaning side of it), consideration for wild animal welfare is quite common. But that slice of animal welfare is a small world.
One anecdotal observation is that among more ânormalâ ethical vegans, habitat destruction is commonly seen as much less important than factory farming.
However, I think there is truth in the article: vegans are probably more likely to have concerns about âthe environmentâ, and there are pro-habitat-preservation memes that end up being tied with animal rights. So Iâm not saying that animal advocacy systematically make people less favourable to wilderness preservation.
The backfire effects of general alignment work early on in AI safety may have outweighed the benefits; I worry that the same could be true for animal-specific alignment.
If I really believe that, I should probably want to avoid money going into animal-specific alignment at this stage, while extra 500,000$ to general alignment, while not necessarily positive, is less likely to cause major backfire events?