With the influx of new funding, don’t hunt for new problems - stop suffering first

Megaprojects for animals (or an updated version perhaps, this list being from 2022) seems more pertinent than ever. 

I strongly agree that the animal welfare implications of AI should be owned at least as much by the AI safety space as by the animal welfare space, not that there needs to be a hard distinction between the two but there is obviously some declarative truth to it. Animal suffering is among the greatest lock-in risks.

I'm worried that many people outside the AW space believe the end of factory farming is a foregone conclusion. At one forum in SF in February mixing leaders from AI safety and AW, many AIS folks came away at least partly convinced by the AW folks that this cannot be taken for granted. AIS needs to take seriously the inside view of AW leaders that AI will not necessarily solve FAW by default, not to mention WAW.

After making sure we don't all die, this should be the first priority

Please do not write clickbait titles like this. Put the subject matter in the title.

I agree that animal welfare is underfunded, but who is this post trying to convince? If funders should fund the most cost-effective interventions or cause areas, then the argument needs to be made on the merits, which are not covered here. Animals don't just automatically win because there is lots of animal suffering today (unless maybe you are a fairly near-termist negative utilitarian).

Well said. On top of this, many new interventions are going to be primarily talent constrained, whereas Animal Welfare is primarily funding constrained. Animal Welfare should be prioritized at least until funding is no longer the main constraint. 

I really like this framing, especially the push against “problem hunting” when there’s already an overwhelming amount of neglected suffering in front of us. Animals are not “one issue” but instead, the majority of moral patients. This is underappreciated, even within EA.

What struck me about the original article was the idea that we don’t yet have the ecosystem to absorb a huge influx of capital. I think that applies here too. Even if we take the case for prioritising animals as seriously as we can, it’s not obvious the field is currently set up to productively deploy funding at the scale you’re pointing to (multiple interventions, geographies, and organisations) without hitting bottlenecks or diminishing returns.

That seems less like a reason not to prioritise animals, and more like a reason to invest heavily in building out the space itself. The animal space doesn't have nearly enough people, enough organisations, and needs better-developed intervention areas, and especially more work on neglected animal populations (which is why what we're doing now at Myrias feels particularly valuable).

Overall, I agree with the core concern. There’s a real risk that a wave of new funding ends up looking for new, legible problems while continuing to underinvest in ones that are already vast, tractable, and unsolved. Making sure that doesn’t happen for animals seems like one of the key challenges for this next phase.

Thank you for the post!

Animals are not one issue

I have long wished to write or see an EA forum post about this. Thanks for doing it!

Great write up! I especially appreciate your one-line descriptions of some of the largest AW issues. Are you aware of any kind of database where these issues are catalogued, and if so, could you point me to it? We have a long list of interventions, but having a long list of discrete welfare issues would be at least equally useful.

Very well said, it's so sad what happens to so many animals and like you said the list goes on and on. And the funny thing is, we are animals. If AI goes well for animals, that implies it goes well for us. 

But we really don't want speciesist AI. If we have AI that has a moral circle based on species membership, or based on certain capabilities like intelligence, what happens when it gets to the point where we are no longer intelligent enough to qualify, or the only species that's morally relevant is the AI species?

FWIW I agree with the sentiment!

However, I think this post as it stands leans a lot on the Importance dimension of the ITN framework, gestures at Neglectedness, and doesn't directly address Tractability. To be clear, that's fine! Not every post needs to address everything; some of the linked posts address those somewhat; other resources out there do too. 

But I do think that the question of 'what can be done with 100s of extra $bn' is also a question of T and N, and I think part (majority?) of what Ransohoff is saying is that we're woefully unprepared ~1 level down from 'cause area' at the infrastructure / intervention / ecosystem / etc. level (where T and N mostly cash out, IMO).  

If people have or can point to write-ups about how many and what size of shovel-ready projects we have for the various animal problems listed: definitely post and signal boost those!!

Maybe a crux here might be 'what sort of net effect one expects from more or less just spending any amount of $ to hire anyone you can to try to find those projects'. Not saying that's the author's take per se; but I am somewhat skeptical of things shaped like "we need[...] a lot more people working on [X]" if what they mean is 'we need to get warm bodies on this at all costs'. People can have net negative impact! There are opportunity costs to going all-in like that! 

Overall I hope a large chunk of this wave of philanthropy goes to animal welfare, but also that it can be spent well and deployed quickly :)

This lands for me, and the line I keep returning to is the one where you catch yourself reducing the most numerous animals on Earth to a single word. That instinct to collapse is the whole problem in miniature.
Think about how we treat human health by comparison. We take one species and split it into twenty urgent priorities: heart disease, cancers, maternal mortality, road accidents,criminal justice , governance... We refuse to flatten ourselves, because every facet of our suffering feels vivid and worth its own field. With animals we run the operation in reverse. We take thousands of species, or at least the dozens we treat most negligently, and fold them into one comparable unit, then ask that single unit to compete for attention against everything else. The asymmetry in how we draw the lines tracks nothing about the underlying scale of suffering. It tracks only how much we let ourselves care.
And the reason is a predictable bias, not a mystery. We value the pain of beings who look and sound like us, and our concern falls off sharply with distance: from our race, our gender, our nation, our species. It's scope insensitivity pointed at the moral circle itself. The chickens fracturing under their own weight and the feeder fish eaten alive are not suffering less than we would. People have tried to put numbers on this, and even the conservative welfare estimates imply aggregate suffering that dwarfs almost anything else we fund. The beings are just far enough from us that the figures don't move us the way they should. Their ordinary day likely  holds more pain than our worst one.
This is where your AI point matters more than the discourse admits. The moral circle we draw right now is the training example a more capable intelligence learns from. If we build systems while modeling the lesson that distance and unfamiliarity justify discounting a being's pain, we are encoding the template that gets applied to us the moment we are the less powerful ones. How we treat what we can ignore today is the precedent for how we get treated when we can be ignored. That is not a footnote to the long-term future. As you say, it may be most of it.
Thank you for refusing to look past them.

I largely agree, the plight of animals is being looked past ... as is the only somewhat realistic solution to factory farming (and, therefore, the implications of AI on factory farming). 

All or most funding currently allocated towards animal welfare in EA ought to be focused on but one intervention, in my view: policy advocacy to help get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves ASAP. No other intervention offers comparable upside (in terms of reduced suffering) of even a modest market penetration of cultivated meat. 

I don't see another way to end factory farming in our lifetimes.

Just one person's strongly held view, though I'm also pleased to see Bruce Friedrich's talk at EAG next week titled 'the only tractable solution to industrial animal farming'. See some of you there! 

Once the Bacon Bill is cooked, there may be an interesting piece for an unusual coalition to write on applying the proposed standards for pig lives for how AI safety may play out for humans - no minimum standards, commercial incentives, etc.