Lawyering for long-term, unimpeachable human progress.
Panashe Zowa
Karma: 16
Hi, there! I completely understand your concerns. I have had to grapple with many of them over the years. Don’t feel discouraged, many of these issues are still subject to debate within the wider EA community.
I am a Zimbabwean who lives and works in Nigeria and South Africa at present. I would like to provide my insights on whether proximity matters. Like all effective altruists, I fundamentally desire to flip the notion that charity begins at home on its head in line with Singerian approaches to ethics and philanthropy. I seek to go where I can help the most.
At this stage however, I believe in focusing on primarily addressing African problems due to my own local expertise and the sheer scale of the developmental challenges in the African context. Some of my critical priorities include reducing poverty, improving healthcare outcomes and enhancing access to quality education.
The epoch of superintelligence will not result in any meaningful improvements in animal welfare. Previous epochs of humanity, marked by transformative advancements such as the industrial and digital revolutions, have failed to yield meaningful improvements in animal welfare. If anything, these shifts created novel pathways for animal exploitation or rendered existing models, such as animal husbandry, vastly more lethal and efficient through the rise and continued development of factory farming. Unless there is a massive societal-level dietary shift, which I think is unlikely or a fundamental change in how society views animal bodies as exploitable resources free for the taking, AGI will likely follow this historical precedent. Like other transformative technologies before it, AGI will be leveraged to further optimise efficiency and, by extension, the lethality of existing egregious practices.