This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
Hello! I'm Justin Portela. I got hired by GWWC to make YouTube videos after AI in Context did such a kickass job.
My channel is using that same cinematic, high-production value beauty to talk about everything in the EA universe that isn't AI.
...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
A big expansion of the non-defence science budget, $8B/yr->$30B+/yr, with ML/genomics/disaster prevention being among the focus areas for the additional funding - interesting! Yet less than federal national defence spending ($60B/yr)., and much less than private R&D ($400B/yr). [1]
I guess groups that are already using defence research grants (maybe AI research) or private funding would be affected to a small-to-medium extent, whereas ones that are not (disaster prevention) could feel a big difference.
1. See Fig 3 and Table 1 at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf