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...
“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...
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NJwqKSbnAgFHogaL2/key-questions-for-digital-minds#comment-S9jjzKf3AaTt62Lja
Leaving this comment up for myself and as a PSA, as the original post by Jacy was deleted shortly after this comment was posted.
Edit: received a message saying the link is broken. I'm not sure why this is, but I think this is an issue if you click the link but not if you copy+paste the link. Screenshot below in any case if this issue persists for others.
DM = digital mind
Archived version of the post (with no comments at the time of the archive). The post is also available on the Sentience Institute blog