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Beliefs or assumptions which determine your overall opinion, but are better targets for argument/ you would more easily change your mind on. For example, one of mine is "philosophy of mind doesn't make progress".
Ok--at Toby's encouragement, here are my thoughts:
This is a very old point, but to my mind, at least from a utilitarian perspective, the main reason it's worth working on promoting AI welfare is the risk of foregone upside. I.e. without actively studying what constitutes AI welfare and advocating for producing it, we seem likely to have a future that's very comfortable for ourselves and our descendants--fully automated luxury space communism, if you like--but which contains a very small proportion of the value that could have been created by creating lots of happy artificial minds. So concern for creating AI welfare seems likely to be the most important way in which utilitarian and human-common-sense moral recommendations differ.
It seems to me that the amount of value we could create if we really optimized for total AI welfare is probably greater than the amount of disvalue we'll create if we just use AI tools and allow for suffering machines by accident, since in the latter case the suffering would be a byproduct, not something anyone optimizes for.
But AI welfare work (especially if this includes moral advocacy) just for the sake of avoiding this downside also seems valuable enough to be worth a lot of effort on its own, even if suffering AI tools are a long way off. The animal analogy seems relevant: it's hard to replace factory farming once people have started eating a lot of meat, but in India, where Hinduism has discouraged meat consumption for a long time, less meat is consumed and so factory farming is evidently less widespread.
So in combination, I expect AI welfare work of some kind or another is probably very important. I have almost no idea what the best interventions would be or how cost-effective they would be, so I have no opinion on exactly how much work should go into them. I expect no one really knows at this point. But at face value the topic seems important enough to warrant at least doing exploratory work until we have a better sense of what can be done and how cost-effective it could be, only stopping in the (I think unlikely) event that we can say with some confidence that the best AI welfare work to be done is worse than the best work that can be done in other areas.
To my mind, the first point applies to whatever resources are used throughout the future, whether it’s just the earth or some larger part of the universe.
I agree that the number/importance of welfare subjects in the future is a crucial consideration for how much to do longtermist as opposed to other work. But when comparing longtermist interventions—say, splitting a budget between lowering the risk of the world ending and proportionally increasing the fraction of resources devoted to creating happy artificial minds—it would seem to me that the “size of the future” typically multiplies the value of both interventions equally, and so doesn’t matter.