Hi there! Iām an EA from Madrid. I am currently finishing my Ph.D. in quantum algorithms and would like to focus my career on AI Safety. Send me a message if you think I can help :)
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AGI could, in principle, find solutions for the key problems that animals face, but I would argue the main issue is that it wonāt automatically enlighten humans.
I think one could argue that creating an index across causes makes sense, because it allows for exposure on things that are hard to compare (eg, we are not perfect utilitarians). I think in practical terms, it would help EAs have some reference and an easy way to donate across causes. For example, one could create a fund that is indexed to the elicited preferences of the EA community, or to some group of experts. The closest I am aware of is what Giving What We Can do.
This may be a bit of a conceptual vs purpose difference, but I would certainly not put insects as a good alternative even on simple moral grounds. Eg, it is likely not the type of alternative protein Iād be looking for.
I donāt know about other folks but I think this is my first criticism of them as long as I can remember, both online and offline. In general I think they have been fairly responsible with AI safety, or as responsible as I would expect a company to be. But even if I did criticise them a lot, I think it would still be a valid criticism. After all, as a non American I feel quite unease about this, even if they are arguably not the main actor. In any case, I think liberal democracies should oppose mass surveillance in general.
Worth noting that the mass surveillance friction point is only about domestic mass surveillance. Thus, does Anthropic believes mass surveillance of non-Americans is just fine?
Do we also have a reference for what numbers are typically good in other interventions?
But AGI provides a clear mechanism of erosion of democracy (as a country you need less of your population) and a destabilising wave due to the difference in capabilities of countries.
Iām pretty confident the EA community is underdiscussing on how to prevent global AGI powered autocracy, especially if the US democracy implodes under AGI pressure. There are two key questions here: (I) How to make the US more resilient, and (ii) how can we make the world less dependent on the US democracy resilience.
I donāt know what SAD means, probably worth defining it early on in the post.
I agree. A reason why it may be easier is that the average age of farmers is high, close to 60. This may be sufficiently high, and population sufficiently small, that standard national support schemes could bear with it.
On alternative proteins: I think the EA community could aim to figure out how to turn animal farmers into winners if we succeed with alternative proteins. This seems to be one of the largest social risks, and itās probably something we should figure out before we scale alternative proteins a lot. Farmers are typically a small group but have a large lobby ability and public sympathy.
I have thought about it for a few minutes, and while I agree with all you sayātalking to people from advocates āin their own campā will certainly lower the social costāit will still frame refraining from animal consumption as a cost. I think it would make change much easier if going vegan provided back something people sought, not just moral satisfaction. Those things can be money, pleasure, social statusā¦ but I think we need to provide something back; and something they want.
Thanks for your comment Tobias! I read and enjoy your Substack a lot
However, having been in the animal/āvegan movement for a few decades, it doesnāt strike me that the approaches you mention havenāt been tried. Both companies and NGOs have been trying to make all things veg cool for a long time...
Probably you are right, I am fairly new to the area. This is probably more visible for companies than NGOs, though.
I think many believed that this approach might be sufficient until, say, five years ago (until Beyond Meat crashed and all).
Clay Christensenās framework suggests an important problem with focusing on plant-based burgers is that they are essentially a (hopefully indistinguishable) replacement, which would mean they are attacking the incumbentās core markets and value proposition and thus would be categorised as sustaining rather than disruptive innovation. This makes it hard to displace incumbents. But many experts have surely considered this and many other considerations long ago.
I still think the issues are social to a very great extent, but maybe they have become more ideological and identity related still, to the extent that they canāt be solved in the way you suggest?
The average person that I know who has not been in touch with the animal welfare movement does not seem to place much of their identity in relation to meat. There is certainly some social consensus that is sympathetic to farmers and people living in rural areas more generally, as they would be with, e.g., doctors. This is where most farmers seem to draw their political power from, but I think this is distinct from most individual identities because animal welfare is a low saliency issue. In fact, I would argue that climate change is much more ideological and identity-related.
I donāt have any insight, but what you are proposing looks good to test out, perhaps starting small and validating the hypothesis.
SoĀcial and disĀrupĀtive inĀnoĀvaĀtion strateĀgies for alĀterĀnaĀtive proteins
What would be the motivation? Is writing a good skill to have and thus merits practising?
In the margin and within the budget allocated to AI safety, the EA community has underspent on power concentration problems and overspent on AI control.
āIt is appropriate for small donors to spend time finding small charities to supportā
For:
Larger donors typically only have the ability to study large donation opportunities.
Against:
I think most small donors (such as myself) are pretty bad at gauging the evidence in areas they are not expert in.
Perhaps a better framing is: āOn the margin, should we devote farmed animal welfare resources to improve the animals being farmed (e.g., via corporate campaigns) or devote resources to substituting farmed animals altogether via alternative proteins?ā
Thanks for the post!
As Bruce Friedrich mentions in its book Meat, I think this is unlikely to be the case. While I expect opposition from farmers, I think the large companies are more likely to be supportive, because (i) it is plausible that cultivated meat could become much cheaper than animal produced one, the floor is lower, (ii) they could create larger barriers to entry, using eg IP, and (iii) they do not have large sunk costs in their conventional animal farming facilities, and (iv) it likely allows them faster market reactions to demand and more stability (no avian flu, say). Bruce sometimes feels a bit too optimistic in its book, but I tentatively agree with those points.
I am not well calibrated on this, but I would argue the likelihood of the full EU making cultivated meat illegal is low. I think many countries in the EU have been able to ban GMOs or nuclear power because there was little push from the pro-GMO or pro-nuclear side, and there were easy environmental arguments to be made from the anti side, even if misguided. I donāt think that is likely to be the case for cultivated meat. It is more likely to resemble what happened with coal phase-outs.
I think the most likely scenario is:
There are farmersā protests.
The EU makes it harder but not illegal to sell cultivated meat, perhaps delaying some approvals.
At some point, it becomes easier to subsidise animal farming than to ban cultivated meat outright, because spending money is always easier, and they are doing it already anyway.
This gradually stops except for the highest welfare farming conditions, as old and nasty factory farms become places nobody wants to work in, and thus no individual farmers rely on them for a living.
It is also worth noting that if one cultivated meat product is approved for sale in the EU, one could, with time and patience, probably strike a single market case to bring down laws forbidding its sale in other EU countries. I agree, though, with the statement that ācurrent trajectories in the US and EU point toward more restrictions before the likely arrival of AGI.ā
Throughout the draft there seems to be a question on whether cultivated meat would achieve the same taste. In practice, I think the consumers wonāt really wonder too much if it looks, tastes and is otherwise exactly the same as what they typically buy. This is, in fact, perhaps the biggest difference between cultivated vs plant-based food: plant-based can taste just as good, but an individual product may not offer the original culinary flexibility. For example, literally from today, blind tasting of Aleph Farms cultivated meat did confirm this source here.
I think it is likely that from the purely scientific point of view, someone will pay for that to happen, be it Jeff Bezos (who has research centres for the matter), Bill Gates (who is quite worried about climate change) or Dario Amodei (who thinks AI for biotechnology is the best application of AI).
Again, how rooted is this in actual data? It would seem to me that if you go to the supermarket and you find two exactly equivalent products (package included) with a $0.25 price difference, people will typically buy the cheap one. Especially if they try it and they like it, which they should, since it is the same. In fact, what confuses me about comments like this is how a product can cause neophobia if it looks and is perceived as exactly equivalent to the old one. Youād have to flag something about ālabsā for it to be even perceived as a different product in the first place.
I think this may not be the right way to look at this, not just because they may be correlated, but also because it is not a 1-shot event. There will likely be a back and forth of events with bans and reversals, say, until some stable equilibrium is achieved. I think a more useful question to ask is how to stack the probabilities in favour of a given equilibrium.