PhD student (in bioethics) in the National University of Singapore
Fai
Karma: 2,068
Thank you for the post!
Animals are not one issue
I have long wished to write or see an EA forum post about this. Thanks for doing it!
I don’t understand the negative karma for a comment that has 5 agreement votes to 0 disagreement. I wonder if some of you can explain the reason for agreeing but downvoting this?
Thank you for the great post! I don’t have comments right now on your subject matter, but want to provide a bit of information about my region.
and then trying to steer the conversation as quickly as possible back towards safer, intuitive examples, like malaria nets, lead poisoning, factory farms, biosecurity, etc.
In China, my sense is that factory farming is not a “safe” option when it comes to explaining EA, cause prioritization, etc to non-EAs or even new EAs. On the other hand, for some reason, AI seems to be much more “safe” than factory farming.
Spare billions of chickens from cages by preventing the expansion of broiler chicken cages in East and Southeast Asia. [Short-term]
Thank you for the post! I am glad that this is on the radar! (broiler cages in particular, but also in general, thwarting the growth of certain industries or practices)
Thank you for this very helpful post. I am insipred to reflect on my often muddled and repetitive writing style, and then improve.
Do you know if the Centre for Biomedical Ethics was consulted?
I am trying to ask. I will PM you when I get an answer.
It would also be very interesting to know how the university and IRB approval worked here.
I will try to investigate too.
Please feel free to email me to keep in touch. Or add me on linkedin.
Clarification: They commissioned the YLL School of Medicine, particularly the Life Science Institute, to validate the idea of using CL1 to build datacentres. Of course they won’t commission a centre for bioethics to do that.
Excuse me for posting this two times:
By the way, I am a PhD student at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics under the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, which is commissioned to be in charge of the validation of the idea in Singapore. I am not sure what I, or even our centre can do (personally, I didn’t know this was happening until I saw this post). But if anyone can think of anything I should do, let me know. (if you think there might be infohazard, feel free to PM or email me)
By the way, I am a PhD student at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics under the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, which is commissioned to be in charge of the validation of the idea in Singapore. I am not sure what I, or even our centre can do (personally, I didn’t know this was happening until I saw this post). But if anyone can think of anything I should do, let me know. (if you think there might be infohazard, feel free to PM or email me)
Thanks for sharing! I have a follow up question:
This is why we are intentionally spending more of our effort looking for opportunities in Africa to prevent and roll back intensive farming methods liked caged hen farming
Is the rise of caged broiler systems also under your radar? That includes its rise in China (where this system started), Asia, and Africa.
Thank you for the post!
Protect numerous and neglected species from intensive confinement systems as new forms of animal agriculture emerge
I wonder if you consider the potential rise of meat consumption in Africa due to the projected wealth increase in many African countries to be one of the greatest new factory farming crisis? And if yes, do you consider that to be one of the greatest priority areas?
I actually don’t have anything substantive to say. But since I often read your posts and not comment or say thank you (but I usually upvoted), so for once I would like to say thank you for your interesting, stimulating, and often important work!
Thank you for the clarifcation! And thanks for engaging in the conversation!
Thanks for the reply!
it would make sense to focus on layers in the Middle East until hitting diminishing returns there.
I wonder why you hold this view. It seems to me that for the caged layer issue, it’s a reversion problem because the vast majority of laying hens in the Middle East are already caged, while for the caged broiler issue, it can still be seen as a prevention problem because many broilers are still not yet in caged systems. And it seems to me that it’s plausible that a prevention might be easier and more effective than a reversion?
Thank you for the post! I have a question.
3. Cage-free farming in the Middle East
I wonder if this org, if incubated, might potentially expand to the issue of caged broiler farming?
AI Alignment: The Case for Including Animals
We should prioritize slowing the spread of industrial animal agriculture in future high-production regions over investing in advocacy in currently high-production regions that remain neglected in terms of farmed animal advocacy.
I support this, I gave an EAGx (Singapore) talk basically arguing for this (maybe a more general point, that we should focus much more on prevention)
Thank you for the post. I have a follow-up question which I hope you or Givewell can answer: Do Givewell also give cage systems to people in need, or teach them how to use cages, or both? I am asking because I have seen livelihood projects that do one of these. If my memory is not wrong, they include FAO, World Bank, the Dutch Government, and Heifer (yes, they don’t just give cows, they give chickens too and teach them how to use cage systems).
Hi Cameron,
Did you see Chytrid Fungal Infection and Frog Welfare — EA Forum?
It would be great if you can respond to it too.
Thanks for asking, here are some ideas I personally wish funders would consider at least investigating. The epistemic status of some of these ideas is not great, and I never attempted any robust analysis on the expected values of these potential interventions/causes, but I hope they are worth investigating.
Stop/slow down the development of remotely controllable insects (not just for AW reasons; such a tech can be misused for surveillance, military uses, and bioterrorism)
Stop the spread of caged broiler systems, particularly in African countries, and other LMICs.
Help the most (probably) farmed fish on earth (in terms of number of individuals, counting from actual quantities sold), pond loaches, who suffer from mortality rates like 20-80%, stressful and long transports, and long, excruciating slaughters.
FWI is investigating potential interventions, both on the on-farm condition, and slaughter
Using “Virtual Control Groups” to reduce the number of animals used in the control groups in preclinical studies and basic research
think about it, the control group should be similar across different experiments using the same strain of animal. But animals in the control arm also suffer, because they have to be captivated in small spaces, eat boring food, fed “vehicle chemicals” meant to carry the drug in the test arm, and also have their blood drawn. So the idea is: why don’t we reuse historical control group data (it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the spirit)
Building an LLM-based agent that can allow regulators and drug discovery researchers to have an easy-to-use AI agent with a text-based chat interface (credit to Alexandra Hammond, who developed the idea with me). This idea specifically tackles the problem that many regulators, and some researchers, are reluctant to use ML/DL models that can predict toxicities of chemicals to replace animal tests because there are too many different models, with each of them working for only a narrow range of chemicals. This idea also partly solves the “blackbox concern” excuse used by some regulators to not adopt AI alternatives to animal tests. This idea might be achievable from two different architectures, or the combination of them
Allow the LLM-based agent to access and utiliize various ML/DL models that can be found online, open-sourced, and either teach researchers and regulators how to apply them to certain kinds of chemicals, or even just give the prediction directly in the chat.
Train a multi-modal LLM, with one of its modes being toxicity data.
It seems to me that many alt-protein companies, particularly cultivated meat ones, are interested in using AI to take their research to a new level. But since each of these companies data are proprietary, none of them can get their models to become a large model. What if we fund an open-source large database for alt proteins which everyone can use to train models to help their work. Or maybe we even just fund both the database and the training of a “large-altpro-model”.
AI to help wild animal welfare. A particular intervention that might serve many values, such as signalling effect, signposting, experimentation, and piloting, is to use AI-controlled drones that can identify animals who are in serious injuries or diseases so bad that it means they will not survive for long (and will die from starvation, dehydration, being eaten alive, or multiple organ failures). The drone would have the capability to euthanize the animal on the spot, preferably with methods that would not leave a trace (e.g. if a chemical was used, it has to be non-toxic to at least predators and scavengers nearby). The design is to try to make sure there is as little counterfactual impact on the situation, other than the alleviation of suffering by killing the animal sooner
Note: My original idea was to even limit the use case to animals with broken spines or multiple broken limbs so that counterfactually, not even the location of the death would differ.
Supporting the research of using AI-controlled drones, preferably of insect sizes, for investigating cruelty in factory farms
Of course, don’t use remote-controllable insects.
The idea could be expanded to investigating any animal cruelty cases
Controversial and risky, socially, politically, and legally