Effective Altruism Forum

Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?

Featured

New & upvoted

Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?

There's a quote in the post:

Some effective altruists expect artificial general intelligence (AGI) or transformative AI (TAI) to solve the taste and price challenges for alternative meats, and so they wonder: What's the point of work on alternative meats now?

I'd be interested to learn more about the reasoning behind this view. So far I'm only familiar with [1](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DuCWLYx4jAFPMXKjZ/paper-artificial-intelligence-in-life-extension-from-deep) and [2](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TYhs8zehyybvMt5E4/).

And I have an intuition (possibly because I'm unintentionally making a strawman out of the actual position simply because I don't understand it) that the "we need AGI to solve this problem" relies on the assumption that "AGI is a thing that will solve basically all existing problems simply because it's generally much better at solving problems than we are". And the implicit conclusion is "so we don't need to think about how exactly AGI will solve this particular problem".

It seemed to me that the post was arguing against this approach.

And I actually want to argue even further:

I think we somewhat understand the problem at the gears-level where we can build models and test them against reality, given that we have narrow AI with today's SOTA capabilities at our disposal. Current models have already shown themselves to be effective in some kinds of scientific research (mostly when the task is formulated in a specific, AI-tractable way).

And overall I assign a higher probability to A than B.

Where A is: "We can build a high-level model of what interventions are needed to achieve large-scale replacement of animal products, ensure a smooth and comfortable transition, and make this new dietary pattern stable. And then decompose the problem in such a way that the applied parts of this research would benefit significantly from using SOTA AI. And eventually succeed."
Where B is: "We manage to build an AI that will solve a whole range of very different problems, including this one, without us having to put effort into investigating this particular problem now."

And I assign a substantially higher probability to A than B. (And I'm not even talking about existential risks here, but never mind.)

Is it really true that my view is far from consensus? I thought pretty much everyone thought roughly along these lines, but after reading this post I'm somehow not so sure anymore.