An AI that is to us as we are to other species does not go well for us. It needs to have better values!
VeryJerry
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VeryJerry’s Quick takes
Yes, definitely in favor of more pro-animal politics! I think there are a lot of high impact things the movement can be doing. It’s worth focusing on the ones we know, and researching new avenues and theories of change too.
Thanks for bringing this up and going in-depth on the evidence. I’ve always felt uneasy with the cage free campaigns and shrimp stunning.
Part of that is definitely my more “abolitionist” viewpoint. I hear about those and think “wait how much money are we putting towards exploiting animals in a bit less bad way?” Of course an improvement is an improvement so if they are actually better then that is better, and there is benefit to getting momentum. It’s easier to take a mile once you’ve gotten an inch, so to speak. But if we don’t even actually know if the increment we’re pushing is better, that’s a problem that deserves to have alarm bells sounding.
That said, I don’t really know what would be better tactically. Lately I’m pretty AI-pilled, thinking that if we can make AGI aligned with all sentient beings then that will be a huge benefit. But today’s labs aren’t gonna release a model that only ever suggests vegan recipes, and the future of AI is highly speculative.
Sometimes I wonder if we should just start doing door-to-door vegan advocacy, like the jehovahs witnesses and normy politics and deep canvassing (and street epistemology and “smart politics” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D2GrrrrfipHWPJSHh/book-review-how-minds-change ).
Assert, don’t describe. Linguistic Features that shift LLM reasoning about animal welfare
Great article, very well said!
I would especially emphasize the human/non-human dynamics. In a sense, we are the TAI of the animal kingdom, and the results have been disastrous for every species we happened to decide to factory farm. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you comes to mind.
Also, for a more artistic and entertaining take on the veil of ignorance, check out https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/being-john-rawls
To expand, posts like these give me https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/someone-who-is-good-at-the-economy-please-help-me vibes.
“Someone who is good at finding grantmakers please help, life on my planet might get wiped out if we don’t fund saving it”
“Hire people who are maybe not quite as elite-of-the-elite-tier talent as you hoped, since they can still do a ton of good”
“no”
when a strong candidate turns down a CG offer, the result is often not “a slightly-less-good grantmaker,” it’s just one fewer grantmaker. We routinely close rounds with fewer hires than we’d planned for.
Have you considered leaving rounds open longer and/or hiring slightly-less-good grantmakers instead of closing the round?
Very well said, it’s so sad what happens to so many animals and like you said the list goes on and on. And the funny thing is, we are animals. If AI goes well for animals, that implies it goes well for us.
But we really don’t want speciesist AI. If we have AI that has a moral circle based on species membership, or based on certain capabilities like intelligence, what happens when it gets to the point where we are no longer intelligent enough to qualify, or the only species that’s morally relevant is the AI species?
For what it’s worth, I’m surprised that people who think abortion is murder aren’t doing more illegal stuff to destroy clinics.
Also for what it’s worth, I think factory farming is so bad that it’s by far the greatest injustice caused by humans in history. Justifiable wars have been fought for orders of magnitude less important things.
If factory farming ends, animal products will be prohibitively expensive for most people, so you’ll end up mostly vegan anyways. Why not start now?
What are gene drives? Is that like genetically modifying insects to not feel pain and then introducing them into the environment so the pain-free genes eventually replace all the standard genes? (Or whatever other genetic feature, not necessarily pain related)
Hmm, that opens up a lot of interesting conversation threads. I actually think some goals will be easier to align ai towards than others, for example we’ve aligned some ai to winning at chess and now they’re better than any human. Obviously that kind of goal is much simpler than any values framework that would be worth aligning agi too, but I think sentientist values would be easier to instill than “human values” (although not in the case of LLMs, I think they’re already basically “aligned” with human values and we now need to shift them towards caring more about all sentient beings). And on top of that, I think sentientist values will care enough about us and our values that a sentientist agi would “go well” for us.
But I’m not even close to an expert, so that’s all very tentative speculation.
Have you seen the moral ambition folks?
As far as I know, most current alignment work is going towards aligning ai with human values. If that’s successful then yay for us, but if we worked towards aligning ai with sentientist values (along the lines of “evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings”), then we would also be in the group of valued beings. If people think that would go well for us, then I think it would make sense to think about ways to redirect more research towards aligning ai with all sentient beings, rather than just human values.
For example, humans. We are somewhat aligned with ourselves, but not with other animals, and that’s been catastrophic for animals (see factory farms, industrial fishing). If we encountered aliens that were more powerful than us, that had alignment like ours, they would not care about wiping us out (maybe a few of them would, but most wouldn’t). But if those aliens were aligned with all sentient beings, they would care. Say for some reason that very powerful aliens were somehow convinced by elephants to be aligned with elephants, we would still be on the chopping block along with every other species. So it’s in everyones interest to align them with all sentient beings, and in the process, we get alignment with us as well.
I would be interested in hearing why people might think ai that went well for animals would not go well for humans, I can imagine scenarios like that but they seem extremely unlikely to me.
I’m having a hard time putting what I mean into words, something like “alignment with all sentient beings gets alignment with humans for free whereas alignment with humans does not get alignment with other sentient beings for free” plus “alignment with all sentient beings is simpler than alignment with humans in particular”. I think the question I posed in my original comment would help determine whether someone agrees with the first part of this paragraph.
I think a second important question is “If AGI goes well for animals, it’ll go well for humans” which I think is extremely likely, but I’m much more doubtful about it going well for animals if it goes well for humans.
We are animals, so it going well for animals allows us to instill at least somewhat simpler values in AI, but many people will want humans to be privileged in ai values which is not only more likely to exclude non-humans, but it’ll also be a potentially more complicated and more likely to fail
One good technique for listening to the part of you that’s struggling is internal double crux. Note that it has to be able to go both ways, it’s not a new way to override the elephant
Sweet, that would be really helpful! I recently read gwerns post on modafinil, but found it wasn’t that helpful for understanding the benefits of taking it, or how to use it effectively (dose, schedule, etc) 😅 I tend to get pretty good sleep, and the main takeaway I got from that post was that it mainly lets you need less sleep
Do you have any insight into using psychedelics for good? I know gwerns microdosing lsd test came up negative, and I haven’t found it helpful for me to focus on a job I don’t like even though it pays well (it actually made it worse) so I haven’t tried it since or for something I actually care about (I’m actively looking for a new role that I will care more about, and may pay better). But I know real trips sometimes help me focus for the following week or two. I’m also curious about using low-dose dmt while working, I found it slightly helpful the one time I tried and may try again but figured I’d ask if you know
This is similar to my experience trying to get into AI x Animals specifically. I work full time at a standard software engineering job, and I decided to start getting involved in the space.
I started out trying some writing, but I really struggled with it and felt like I didn’t have much to say that other people weren’t saying better already. I still feel that way.
Then I reached out to Compassioned Aligned Machine Learning (compassionml.com) to see if I could volunteer for them. They got me involved, and they could still use help (and funding!) but I really struggle to contribute much while working full time. I’m really proud of what I’ve done so far, it’s helped me grow a lot and I’m excited to keep helping! But I wish I could properly focus on it.
I’ve tried to get into various funded tracks in this field, but they all tend to get filled up by better candidates. I am glad they are getting the best people, but it’s discouraging that there isn’t much room. I want to do more, but I’m unfortunately not really willing to do the huge amount of work needed to get a paid position in the field or start my own organization for it. I would happily take a big pay cut to be able to focus on it full time though. Huge props to the people who do like the folks running CAML!!
Maybe we’re just in the weird phase waiting for Anthropic to ipo and flood the field with funding?