I am very uncertain about whether decreasing the number of farmed animals increases or decreases animal welfare (in expectation) due to potentially dominant effects on soil invertebrates. In addition, I worry decreasing the number of farmed animals may prevent some from having positive lives.

Hi David. Great post. I broadly agree. Relatedly, readers may be interested in the post AI Welfare Is (Frankfurtian) Bullshit.

I sometimes felt you were implying "no evidence" when I thought something closer to "very weak evidence" would be more appropriate. However, in practice, I would agree the focus should overwhelmingly be on decreasing the uncertainty about the extent to which AI models have welfare, and how to measure it.

I don't find this convincing. (NB: I'm still working on this response.) Even if the talker has no access to the valenced consciousness, it's model may simply lead it to a confident and wrong answer about this.

Did you mean "If" instead of "Even if"?

Wha tmight

Nitpick. "What might".

Hi Aïda. That makes sense. However, I think the reasons you mentioned sometimes play against increasing animal welfare. Poorer welfare standards tend to have a lower carbon and land footprint.

Hi Phalox. Thanks for the comment. You may be interested in my post "Insecticide-treated nets [ITNs] significantly harm mosquitoes, but one can easily offset this?", where I compared the effects of ITNs on humans and mosquitoes.

Relatedly, saving human lives also affects soil invertebrates due to resulting in more agricultural land to feed the people who are saved, and I think the effects on soil invertebrates may be much larger or smaller than the benefits to humans. I calculate that GiveWell's top charities change the living time of soil invertebrates by 539 M animal-years per $, and that of soil arthropods by 10.8 M animal-years per $. As illustrated in the graph below, I estimate such charities may change the welfare of soil invertebrates much more or less than they they benefit humans. The title of graph says "Increase in the welfare", not "Change in the welfare", because I assumed expanding agricultural land increases the welfare of soil invertebrates, but I am very uncertain about this. The estimates below suppose welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year is proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent". An exponent between 0 and 2 covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.

Hi Jasmine. I very much agree we should not assume AI welfare will never be measurable. On the other hand, I believe acting as if AIs have welfare makes less sense for greater uncertainty about their welfare, and how to measure it. I think more uncertainty generally implies efforts to decrease it have a greater value of information. I would say uncertainty is currently very large. So I would overwhelmingly focus on decreasing it instead of acting as if AIs have welfare.

Hi Gregory. Great post. Here is a podcast I liked about it which I generated with NotebookLM.

I see. That makes sense. I was thinking you were not interested in consciousness research more broadly.

@nonn? If you initially getting 1 k$ is not enough to motivate you to look into this bet, I would be happy to increase the stakes, potentially up to you initially 10 k$.

Hi Jasmine. Why are you not interested in consciousness research? Because you do not think progress is possible?

Hi Haoyu. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. They seem quite relevant. I am not one of the authors of the paper, but I let the 1st author know about them.