This Awesome! I'm a big fan of your work. There really aren't any other organizations like Sentience Institute, so it's a pity you're not getting more funding .
I'm curious about your reasoning for the greater focus specifically on artificial sentience? Does it seem like the right time now?
Thanks Max! We get a good amount of funding, but each hiring round we receive multiple very strong applicants (e.g., recently graduated PhDs in a very challenging academic job market who are vegetarian or care about MCE-ish issues and would love to unite their passion and their day job) that we would love to hire. We believe we can absorb additional funding to do so, but it can be challenging to fundraise since our work lies at the intersection of animal advocacy and longtermism, and there is also uncertainty with our increased focus on artificial sentience over the last year.
To your question on focusing more on artificial sentience, there are several reasons: when SI was founded in 2017 they didn't think they could get much funding if their focus was on artificial sentience; the farmed animal field, especially EAA and food technology, were in a period of a lot of uncertainty and growth, which seemed important to support; there were a lot of farmed animal research projects that were discussed but nobody was getting around to doing (e.g., social movement case studies, a nationally representative survey), and SI was well-positioned to do them; farmed animal research has taken off a lot since 2017 (e.g., ACE, Faunalytics, Rethink Priorities), and Utility Farm, Wild Animal Suffering Research, Animal Ethics, and now Wild Animal Initiative are doing great work building the field of welfare biology, but basically no organization had emerged to do field-building for artificial sentience, which SI seems well-positioned to do.
I've read some of the work from the historical case studies project and it seems like a project that has the potential to be extremely useful for anyone interested in movement building. I did a comparatively shallow dive into the Neoliberal movement a while ago and found it very useful for my own thinking about movement building and this project seems like it is of substantially better quality.
In fact, I'm surprised no one started a project of reviewing historical movement-building cases until now.
Sentience Institute is a 501(c)3 nonprofit think tank aiming to maximize positive impact through longtermist research on social and technological change, particularly moral circle expansion. This approach is detailed in our new paper in the journal Futures, “Moral Circle Expansion: A Promising Strategy to Impact the Far Future,” and the updated Our Perspective page on our website.
Because moral circle expansion is such a broad topic, when we launched in 2017, we decided to focus on farmed animals, an important, tractable, and neglected cause area. In late 2020 we incorporated a second focus area (alongside our continued work on farmed animals), artificial sentience. While sentient beings today are almost entirely biological, there are compelling arguments that artificial sentience will be much more common in the far future. Few, if any, other organizations have prioritized their moral and social inclusion. For more detail, see our recent blog post, “The Importance of Artificial Sentience.”
We hope to raise $90,000 this giving season to continue working on the most important, outstanding questions in farmed animal research[1] and to solidify our artificial sentience research program. We are highly funding-constrained, with multiple excellent researchers whom we would be thrilled to hire with each call for applications but do not do so because of limited funding. The academic literature on the moral consideration of artificial entities is undergoing rapid growth, so we believe there is currently a unique, time-sensitive opportunity to positively influence the direction of this field. (For more detail, see our new literature review published in Science and Engineering Ethics, “The Moral Consideration of Artificial Entities.”) With additional funding, we are prepared to more rapidly and thoroughly take on this opportunity. We believe that we could absorb, with similar cost-effectiveness, at least $240,000 this giving season and potentially much more. Please consider making a donation or reach out for collaboration, feedback, or questions.
More detail on our in-progress research is available in our Research Agenda.
Note: Higher opacity indicates higher priorities.
So far this year we’ve spent $109,825, broken down approximately as follows (88.9% research, 5.4% outreach, 5.6% admin):
We are currently aiming to raise $90,000 this giving season (November 2021–January 2022) to continue our research on animal farming and to solidify our artificial sentience research program. Given that our current work lies at the intersection of multiple areas — animal farming, artificial intelligence, social change, longtermism — it is outside of the scope of many traditional funding systems. 2021 is a year of particular financial uncertainty for us, so we particularly appreciate your consideration this year.
If we raise our target amount, we plan to make an additional research hire. If we raise above this amount, we will consider hiring additional researchers, the annual cost of which is generally around $60,000 (including all costs, e.g., operations, taxes). We are highly funding-constrained. Our previous hiring round received 123 applications with 5–15 candidates we would have been thrilled to hire, but we only had funding for one at that time. We believe we can absorb funding of up to $240,000 this giving season with similar cost-effectiveness, concurrently hiring several researchers and taking advantage of time-sensitive opportunities for research on artificial sentience. This is a relatively conservative estimate, and we would be very open to a more ambitious plan if funding becomes available.
If you have questions, feedback, or would like to collaborate, please email me at [email protected]. If you would like to donate, you can do so from our website via PayPal or by check. Thank you for your consideration of our work.
We conduct specific research projects that are “low-hanging fruit” in farmed animal research, such as case studies of social movements that have often been referred to in farmed animals strategy without in-depth study (e.g., Social Movement Lessons from the Fair Trade Movement) and experiments that have been suggested many times over the years but not yet run (e.g., The Effects of Animal-Free Food Technology Awareness on Animal Farming Opposition). ↩︎
I've enjoyed reading your work occasionally throughout the year—interesting stuff.
As a general point, posts like this push back against the seeming increasingly popular narrative that EA isn't funding constrained right now. Or more specifically, this post speaks to the fact that we can have a load of money but not be distributing it adequately to all the small non-profits (like SI) that could make good use of it.
Thanks, Haven. Yes, it could be a distribution issue. As noted to Max, we get quite a bit of funding, but each hiring round SI receives a large pool of very strong researcher applicants, and we would love to hire more of them. Also, our approach isn't very well-established in the cause areas of either longtermism or animal advocacy, and it can be particularly challenging to fundraise at the intersection of cause areas (as noted by New Harvest here).