Catia Faria wrote,

If ASIs were aligned with the well-being of all sentient beings, they would be anti-predation

Can a lab please conduct a (humane) experiment where you try to genetically engineer a hypercarnivore like a cat into an obligate herbivore? scientificamerican.com/artic…

I think we need genetic engineering to solve wild animal suffering though (is that eugenics?)

Will the whole of Darwinian life best be forgotten like a bad dream? youtube.com/watch?v=vtLOYKcs…

Maybe humans or post-humans or AIs could monitor for the re-evolution of predation and block it in different ways

If technologies which could render the necessity for carnivory in nature obsolete for the sustaining of the environment were developed, and this would significantly minimize the amount of extreme animal suffering, then it would seem to be good to employ those technologies.

With future advanced monitoring and fertility control tech, we could replace the role of predators by humanely controlling herbivore population sizes

Correct. There is no reason why civilization shouldn't be extended to animals. We should also increase sapience so that they can speak for themselves.

Idgaf about consciousness whatever that is. What’s important are pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness.

I let my dog chase and eat cats because I would never inflict my moral beliefs on him. His moral code involves hunting the neighborhood cats and I as his guardian should never impose my morality on him.

To build paradise on Earth we must dewild all sentient beings

Pip is seven years old and paralysed from the waist down. He has been with us for many years, and apparently nobody has told him that seven is a respectable age for a squirrel — or that paralysis is supposed to stop you having fun. Still playing. Still curious. Still very much enjoying life. 🐿️❤️ Sometimes a disability changes how an animal lives. It doesn’t necessarily take away the joy of living.

💔😢

Vegans will solve wild animal suffering

They usually refuse to have a dialogue

Fact check: true. Extinction, defined as the termination of existence of a species or other category of life, is good for all sentient beings who would otherwise exist if their species hadn’t become extinct. This quote from Arthur Schopenhauer applies at least as much to free roaming animals as to humans: “You may look upon life as an unprofitable episode disturbing the blessed calm of nonexistence.”

Tyler Cowen showing up to defend EA here gives me mild nightmares because I remember him calling the top in 2022: x.com/MargRev/status/1503404… But his bottom line that EA is “directionally correct, even if you should not follow its recommendations all the way” seems directionally correct to me, and in line with what I was getting at last week about EA’s pragmatism: x.com/albrgr/status/21058269… He says more attention to AI safety would be good, and gives EA some credit there. I’d add that EAs were saying this years before most others, which is a pretty good example of Tyler’s closing line that “interesting and valuable ideas” can spring from weird places. (And I say this as someone who was pretty skeptical on the AI safety work for a long time.) And I agree that EAs can be offputtingly arrogant. That’s one reason I’m really glad we practice “worldview diversification” at CG (coefficientgiving.org/resear…) - though I still wish we had a more robust intellectual grounding for it and a better/more principled way to translate it into ultimate allocations. I’m also sympathetic to Tyler’s view that some EAs “perceive a high risk of doom without sufficient evidence,” though I also think that the best available estimates from people who are trying as hard as possible to be neutral (e.g., x.com/Research_FRI/status/20…) suggest plenty of reason for concern. I think a lot of the problem here is just the fundamental difficulty of our epistemic position here, as I think @Research_FRI and @michael_nielsen have done a good job pointing out. With concrete harms like the Hugging Face attack starting to show up in practice, I do sometimes feel like Tyler is unfairly shifting the epistemic goalposts (though not particularly in this case). And as a small correction - CG doesn't have a “$40 billion fund,” or really an endowment of its own at all. I think that number might have come from a back-of-the-envelope guess I gave here (semafor.com/article/09/03/20…), building on @nanransohoff’s estimate of what all AI-linked donors might eventually give each year. Anyway, I agree w/ the upshot that more EA at the margin would be a good thing!

People regularly ask me why we should invest any resources at all in AI consciousness and welfare research and policy when humans, animals, and the environment already face so many threats. This is a fair question! Here are a few brief thoughts about why I think these priorities can and should coexist. I strongly believe that we should invest in protecting humans, animals, and the environment much more than we do. At the same time, I think that this commitment is compatible with taking emerging risks seriously, including risks related to AI safety and AI welfare. These issues all concern extremely large-scale risks, and all of them are neglected relative to their importance. We can and should invest more in all of them. I try to show this in my own work by directing the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at NYU. This allows me to address topics ranging from agriculture and infrastructure to animal and AI consciousness. Not everyone needs to work on all of these issues, of course. But if I can divide my time across them, surely the global research and policy communities can, too. These issues are also linked. Caring about animal welfare can benefit humans as well. Phasing down factory farming and the wildlife trade can improve public health and environmental outcomes, and cultivating compassion beyond our species can strengthen compassion within it. Caring about AI welfare can likewise benefit animals, by improving AI alignment and further extending our compassion. The history of these issues also shows the importance of avoiding zero-sum thinking about priority setting. Part of the reason for our animal welfare and environmental crises is that people once argued that caring about animals was an unacceptable luxury in a world where humans suffer, and that caring about "speculative" future climate risks was an unacceptable luxury in a world with present threats. People today offer the same kinds of zero-sum arguments for dismissing AI safety and AI welfare. Ironically, our current animal welfare and environmental crises are now among the threats that people cite to justify neglecting these emerging risks. Having seen where this reasoning leads, I want to learn from our mistakes with animal and environmental protection and resist this temptation, rather than repeat it. If we think about human, animal, environmental, and AI problems together, we can seek co-beneficial solutions where possible and prioritize thoughtfully where necessary. The question then becomes how to allocate resources across these issues, not which one to focus on at the expense of all the others. For anyone interested, I discuss these problems at length in my book The Moral Circle, among other places. Finally, we need to keep perspective. There are currently tens of people working on AI consciousness and welfare. There could easily be thousands without meaningfully reducing global investment in human, animal, and environmental protection. Concerns about misallocation might arise if the field grew far beyond that, but for now, I think we can safely say that this issue could benefit from further investment. wwnorton.com/books/978132406…

Here's an interview I gave on atheism, amoralism, and animal welfare: walterveit.substack.com/p/ma…