Hazo

In­cum­bents Might Be Re­placed Dur­ing AI Take­off, In­clud­ing in An­i­mal Agriculture

• Hazo 31 Mar 2026 18:47 UTC

  12 points

  1 ∶ 1

  on: The Fu­ture Will Be Weirder Than That

  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.

• Hazo 23 Mar 2026 15:25 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: AGI & An­i­mals: Dis­cus­sion Thread

  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!

• Hazo 3 Mar 2026 16:01 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Aqua­cul­ture frag­men­ta­tion is a port­fo­lio prob­lem CEAs miss

  This seems like an interesting and important point, thanks for writing.

  I might nitpick the way you’re characterizing the terrestrial animal case though. Layers and broilers may technically be the same species, but I think they’re different enough that a lot of the same considerations apply from the fish case. For example, you mention cage-free as the paradigm scalable intervention, but actually they only apply to layers, which I’m guessing constitute less than 5% of global terrestrial animals (most are broilers). Applying a similar intervention to broilers (BCC) has been less successful than for layers.

  Speaking just about the US, I would say there are actually four groups of poultry worth considering. The following are their population sizes and days spent on form from this population per year (US):

  1. Broilers − 9.3b individuals, 437b days on farm /​ year

  2. Layers − 311m individuals, 113b days on farm /​ year

  3. Breeders − 77m individuals, 28b days on farm /​ year

  4. Turkeys − 200m individuals, 27b days on farm /​ year

  This is much more homogenous than aquatic animals, but it’s not quite as homogenous as you made it seem!

• Hazo 13 Feb 2026 16:50 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Turn­ing Farms into Welfare Labs

  Academic studies are definitely slow, but 3-5 years strikes me as extremely slow, even for academia.

  I’m generally on board with what you’re describing but I wonder whether there’s also opportunities to work better with academia? Like if you’re the one providing the funding, you might be able to negotiate with them and keep them accountable to timelines. There’s probably also lots of variability between academics so you can identify the ones that are capable of executing well and quickly, and then work with them.

• Hazo 24 Jan 2026 16:59 UTC

  19 points

  2 ∶ 3

  on: RobertY’s Shortform

  I’ve seen AI-based animal communication technologies starting to be involved in some EA events /​ discussions (e.g. https://​​www.earthspecies.org/​​ ). I’m worried these initiatives may be actively negative, and I’m wondering if anyone has /​​ will articulate a stronger defense of why they’re good?

  The high-level argument I’ve heard is that communicating with animals will make humans be more empathetic towards them. But I don’t see why this would be the most likely outcome:

  1. Humans are already fairly empathetic to animals, especially around things that we’d consider important welfare issues. We don’t need a hen to articulately describe why she’d prefer not to have her beak cut off or be kept in a cage, I think it would be fairly obvious to most people.

  2. Animals might become less sympathetic if we knew what they were saying. It seems possible that most of their thoughts and words are about food, sex, and ingroup /​ outgroup dynamics.

  A similar argument is that communication would allow us to see that animals are actually intelligent, but again I don’t see why this is necessarily the case. If their thoughts are things people would generally consider crude, it’s possible people would become more confident in their lack of intelligence (despite still deserving moral consideration).

  More importantly, a large effect of being able to communicate with animals is that they’ll become more useful to humans. If animals had political power or legal rights, this might open the door to mutually beneficial trade. But in reality, they don’t have these things, so it seems more likely that this would allow humans to exploit these species more easily. They reason chickens, cows, and pigs are in such a bad state is because they’re very useful to humans, and I’m worried animal communication technologies will subject more species to similar fates.

• Hazo 23 Jul 2025 16:32 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kevin Xia 🔸’s comment on: What An­i­mal In­ter­ven­tions are Fast Enough for Short AI Timelines?

  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

What An­i­mal In­ter­ven­tions are Fast Enough for Short AI Timelines?

• Hazo 15 Jul 2025 5:54 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: De­bate: or­gani­sa­tions us­ing Re­think Pri­ori­ties’ main­line welfare ranges should con­sider effects on soil ne­ma­todes, mites, and spring­tails, or at least be trans­par­ent about their rea­sons for ne­glect­ing them?

  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.

• Hazo 5 Apr 2025 15:55 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why Pro­mot­ing Pre­ci­sion Live­stock Farm­ing (PLF) is a Strate­gic Mis­take for An­i­mal Advocates

  I’m curious who in particular you think it making this strategic error? Is it mostly academics promoting PLF or are there NGOs /​ thought leaders doing it?

• Hazo 15 Nov 2024 15:55 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ElliotTep’s comment on: The goal isn’t ‘end fac­tory farm­ing’, but re­duce as much suffer­ing as possible

  I agree with this, although I’m not an expert on cattle rearing. It seems to me like cows on grazeland generally have net positive lives, and cows on feedlots have arguably net negative lives (although it still seems way less bad than a pig or chicken CAFO). The longer a cow spends on pasture the more likely they had a net positive life, e.g. 100% grass-fed cows in the US might have pretty decent lives.

• Hazo 7 Nov 2024 6:47 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Bad omens for US farmed an­i­mal policy work?

  I agree that the elections results were disappointing for animals, and particularly that the EATS act seems significantly more likely to pass in a republican-controlled government.

  However, I think you’re a little too pessimistic on what this means for animal-focused policy work in general. The ballot initiatives that failed this cycle were mostly abolitionist /​ vegany in vibe, which I think is significantly less popular than initiatives that are welfarist in vibe like Prop 12.

  The EATS Act is primarily pushed by industry lobbyists, and doesn’t necessarily reflect that these sorts of laws are getting less popular.

• Hazo 1 Nov 2024 21:14 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 2

  on: The goal isn’t ‘end fac­tory farm­ing’, but re­duce as much suffer­ing as possible

  I think you’re spot on, and I appreciate you writing this post. However, I think you’ve maybe missed the most important reason that you’re correct, which is that the focus on ending factory farming makes the movement significantly less accessible to the broader public than it otherwise could be.

  Most people are broadly on board with welfare changes that animal activists push for (e.g. moving away from battery cages or gestation crates), but less on board with “ending factory farming.” And they’re even less on board if it’s made explicit that what most activists mean by ending factory farming is achieving a world with no or significantly less meat than there is now.

  A lot of the paths to greater impact for the movement go through harnessing broad public support, or building broad coalitions. This is significantly harder to do when the center of gravity of the movement is around something so radical in relation to public opinion. More so when the focus on ending farming pushes the movement towards theories of change that are also unpopular, such as veganism and cultivated meat.

  One might counter this by saying that social movements need a radical flank, and I think there’s merit to this argument. However, the current animal groups pretty much all use messaging around ending factory farming, even the ones perceived to be more “moderate.” I would argue that the movement right now lacks a moderate flank.

  Another reason the framing is bad that you don’t mention is that it makes the industry significantly more skeptical of activists. All businesses look skeptically on external activists to an extent, but I think this is especially so in animal agriculture. Producers know that when activists advocate for e.g. cage-free reforms, their actual goals are to get people to eat fewer eggs, and eventually to get people to stop eating (factory-farmed) eggs all together. Some activists say this explicitly in public. For producers, this makes the activism a battle over the future existence of their industry, not a debate over current practices on the margin, making progress significantly more challenging.

• Hazo 7 Oct 2024 21:00 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 1

  on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  Animal welfare is more important and more neglected, although tractability is less clear.

• Hazo 5 Apr 2024 18:36 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: saulius’s comment on: Two Con­crete Ways to Help Feeder Rodents

  Hi saulius—thanks for those thoughts (and for your previous work on this issue).

  Re pet stores, that could also be an impactful way to go, although a few considerations suggest to me it might not be as impactful. Many of the reptile stores that sell large amounts of mice seem to be small local businesses, not large companies with brands they’d want to protect. There are some international pet companies like PetCo that sell rodents, but I don’t think their volume is that big. Also, many of the smaller pet stores specialize in reptiles, so perhaps people who shop at those stores would have a sense of what’s going on and not be so upset by it, whereas people that go to zoos probably don’t think at all about how the animals are fed. I agree with your point about auditing, I think there’s still more work to do in figuring out exactly what change you’d ask for.

  It’s definitely possible that lots of rodents are fed to other types of animals, particularly birds of prey, although it’s not something that came up much in our research. The UK report at the very end talks about this a lot, which I found somewhat surprising. I don’t have a good sense of how much this might change our estimates.

  The point about average age is something we indeed thought about a lot and asked a few industry people about this. For example, rodent imports are reported by weight, so we tried to estimate the average size of the rodents to figure out how many rodents were being imported. We ended up estimating that the average mouse was a “fuzzy” or “small” which would make them 5-21 days old. For rats it was “pups” and “weaned” which would make them 14-28 days old. I think these were just gut estimates though, so could be wrong.

  I appreciate the kind words, although to avoid taking too much credit I should say that this research was conducted under the umbrella of an existing organization, although we elected to not publish under the name of that organization for various reasons :)

Two Con­crete Ways to Help Feeder Rodents

• Hazo 29 Feb 2024 18:51 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How we started our own EA char­ity (and why we de­cided to wrap up)

  Thanks for your work trying this out, and for this informative writeup!

  One thing you might consider for next time on the outreach side is the notion of “leading with value.” I think you’re right that fish farmers will get lots of sales-y outreach all the time, so even if you’re framing yourself as “farmer friendly,” you probably need some way to grab their attention or stand out.

  One way to do this is to first find a way to provide some sort of value to them before you’ve officially connected. What this looks like will differ based on the audience, but it seems like you developed strong expertise over the course of your research that I think opens up some options, even for an under-resourced group. For example:

  • You could develop some super clear and easy to read resources for farmers and put them up on your website. For example, you could write up a “market snapshot” that discusses all of the ESS products on the market, and their relative merits. Or you could map out which seafood companies are using which machines, so that companies can easily compare what they’re doing to their competitors. Then, when you do outreach, you can start with those resources and say “I wanted to make sure you saw this. Also, we’d love to have a conversation to understand what other information we could provide that would be useful.”

  • It’s often surprisingly easy to get articles publishes in trade press for smaller industries like aquaculture. For example, you could closely track what’s happening with ESS around the world, and then when there’s e.g. a development in Asia or North America you can pitch that story to trade journalists in Europe along with a quote from you. Or you could pitch an oped directly for trade press that outlines the basic case for using ESS. Then, when you reach out to producers you can lead with a link to the article as a demonstration of your expertise.

  Generally I think business will be unlikely to engage with a new entity unless they have a strong sense there will be some value for them in it. If you can find some way to provide even a little bit of value to them immediately, then I think they would be more likely to engage. Just a thought!

• Hazo 19 Jul 2023 0:42 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: AMA: Peter Wilde­ford (Co-CEO at Re­think Pri­ori­ties)

  Are there any notable differences in your ability to have impact in the different areas you conduct research? E.g. one area where important novel insights are easier /​ harder, or one area where relevant research is more easily translated into practice

• Hazo 19 Jul 2023 0:39 UTC

  19 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: AMA: Peter Wilde­ford (Co-CEO at Re­think Pri­ori­ties)

  Have you considered doing an Animal Charity Evaluators review? I personally think Rethink puts out some of the most important animal-related research out there!

• Hazo 15 May 2023 1:40 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: An­nounc­ing In­no­vate An­i­mal Ag (like GFI but for An­i­mal Welfare Tech)

  Thanks for the detailed comment Jamie! I appreciate you taking the time to write out your thoughts.

  I’m not sure I understand your first point. Do you believe that the dominant effect of something like a cage-free corporate campaign is “public discussion, connections between advocates and decision-makers, activist recruitment etc”? If so, then I disagree. I think the primary effect is the better lives the chickens have when not in cages.

  I think more likely what you’re saying is that the secondary effect of “momentum towards further change” outweighs the other secondary effect of complacency. I agree in the case of cage free campaigns, and I also agree it’s less clear in the case of animal welfare technologies. However I’ll say:

  1. The best way to commercialize many (though not all) technologies involves public discussion (i.e. marketing). For example, in-ovo egg sexing tech has already led to numerous mainstream articles about the problem of male chick culling in the egg industry. I actually think promoting tech could be a particular good way to generate public discussion about animal ag in a non-antagonistic, non-inflammatory way. Similar comments apply for connections w/​ decision makers and recruitment.

  2. The dominant effect is still the birds not being in cages. Even if you thought cage-free campaigns led to some complacency, they could still be worth it because of the massively important primary effects. Same thing goes for animal welfare technologies.

  On the general point of humanewashing, there’s a ton of discussion on that on the internet, and I don’t have anything particularly novel to say about it. I’ll just note how I currently think about it:

  1. Concerns about humanewashing apply to many activist-y welfare-focused efforts that EAs tend to support (e.g. corporate cage-free campaigns) as well as animal welfare technologies.

  2. Abolitionist-focused and alt-protein-focused activist efforts have a huge risk of the small animal replacement problem, which is a major way that efforts can cause unintended harm. Directly targeting the most problematic practices is one of the best ways in my experience to avoid the SRAP. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any way to avoid just doing your best with expected value and accepting some risk of causing unintended harm.

  3. Practically speaking, often the efficiencies from an animal welfare technology are minor, and the effects on welfare often huge. Technologies that have major implications for efficiency are more likely to happen without intervention. For example, in the long-term, I think in-ovo egg sexing could be a cost-saver for hatcheries, causing egg prices to decrease by some fraction of a percent. Ultimately, I think it’s well worth it to save billions of chicks from being ground up alive, but I acknowledge there’s room for disagreement there.

  On your question regarding counterfactual value, I’m not sure I understand. I was saying that if a company actively seeks us out for collaboration, then that suggests we can help them do something that they can’t do on their own, i.e. we’re providing counterfactual value. I do think that interventions in the category of “supporting X” often have the effect of both “making X more likely to happen rather than not” and “making X happen faster,” and the two effects can be difficult to disambiguate. Both are positive effects though.

  Hope this all makes sense, please let me know if I’ve misunderstood something!