Dear Amazing EA Forum Users,
Thank you for dedicating yourselves to doing good.
Today I read an article in Watt Poultry that stoked an old fear. It's a fear that comes up for me—and I think for some other animal-focused EAs—when thinking about the longterm future. My fear is: Will the longterm future mean expanded factory farming, which goes on forever? (And therefore produces exponentially more suffering than factory farming currently produces?) Who is looking out for animals in the longterm future?
The article was titled Chickens grown on Mars?. It says:
With the research done by the NC State Nuggets on Mars program, we could one day be growing chickens on Mars . . . .
[The teachers] will learn about . . . the unique challenges of raising chickens on Mars. . . .
At the end of the program, the participants will be tasked with putting together a unit for their class focused on developing ideas on ways to raise chickens on mars.
Emma, Cottrell, Chickens grown on Mars?, Watt Poultry (Mar. 11, 2022), https://www.wattagnet.com/articles/44685-chickens-grown-on-mars.
The Nuggets on Mars program is apparently being paid for by the U.S. federal government's United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). And it sounds like the program has support from an ag industry group called the North Carolina Farm Bureau Federation.
From this article, it seems that some in the U.S. agriculture industry and the U.S. government hope that a future of humans on other planets will include factory farming on other planets!
That's exactly my fear.
The plans described in this article differ from what I've often heard longtermist EAs say, when I bring up my recurring fear about animal cruelty in the longterm future. I generally hear longtermist EAs reassure me that, (1) 'If we expand to living on other planets, we won't bring factory farming with us, because it would be too cumbersome to raise animals in space,' (2) 'In the far longterm future, all minds will be digital, so we will no longer have to worry about animal cruelty,' and (3) 'Over time, people will become more empathetic, so future humanity will treat animals better.'
I hope that the longtermist EAs are right, and that the meat industry is wrong. But, in my experience, the meat industry is pretty good at getting things done, even if those things seem wasteful or cumbersome. (For example, farming animals for food, even on Earth, is already far less efficient than farming plants. And yet the number of animals farmed expands every year.) And the meat industry and the U.S. government seem to WANT the future to involve high-tech ways to factory farm even more animals. So that scares me.
I acknowledge that this news article is focused on a far shorter term future than longtermists think about. The article seems to hint that people could start living on Mars within the lifetime of children who are alive today. But to someone, like me, who is uneducated on such topics, the practice of factory farming in space seems like a practice that, once started, could simply continue and expand. Think, for example, of what happened with factory farming on Earth. My mind says, 'Once factory farms get to Mars, perhaps it will be too late to prevent a future of constantly expanding space factory farms?'
I know essentially all EAs care about all sentient minds, including animal minds. And I know that the EAs focused on longtermism care about animal welfare, to the extent there will be animals in the longterm future.
My fear, though, is that, from my vantage point, longtermism and factory farming seem like two separate EA cause areas that are rarely discussed together. (This may be totally wrong, and I apologize if it is.) My decade in animal advocacy has taught me that farmed animals almost always get forgotten. And it has also taught me that people outside of the animal movement tend to have an inaccurately inflated sense of how powerful the animal movement is. So, I can't help wondering: Will farmed animals get forgotten, when EAs succeed in figuring out a way to keep humanity going forever? Are longtermist EAs assuming that farmed-animal EAs have this issue covered, while farmed-animal EAs assume that longtermists have it covered?
Therefore, I want to ask three questions to my fellow EAs:
(1) What are we doing, and what can we do, to make sure factory farms don't come with us, if humanity expands to other planets?
(2) If we digitize all minds, how will we ensure that digitized humans treat digitized animals better than flesh-and-blood humans currently treat flesh-and-blood animals?
(3) What are we doing, or what can we do, to ensure that future humans have a new ethic of being kind to animals?
Thank you all for everything you do to make the world, the future, and all conscious experiences, better! And thank you for your patience with an article written on a topic (longtermism) that I know very little about.
Love,
Alene
I don't see a way for it to go on forever.
(See the cellular agriculture/cultured meat projects.)
It would be deliriously conservative to expect as many as 10 thousand years to pass before humans begin to improve their own minds, to live longer while retaining mental clarity and flexibility, to be aware of more, to be more as they wish to be, to reckon deeply with their essential, authentic values, to learn to live in accordance with them.
Even this deliriously conservative estimate of 10 thousand years would place the vast majority of future after this transition.
And after that transition, I would expect to see a very large portion of humanity realize that they have little tolerance for the suffering of other beings.
Even if the proportion of humanity who weather uplifting and somehow remain indifferent to suffering is high, say, 30%, I'd expect the anti-suffering majority to buy all of their farms from them, few could relish suffering so much that we would not offer more, to halt it. Very little suffering would continue.
If you think that this will not be the case — that the deep values of the majority of humanity genuinely do not oppose suffering —... Then it is difficult to imagine a solution, or to argue that this even is a problem that a thing like EA can solve.
At that point, it would be a military issue. Your campaign would no longer be about correcting errors, it would be about enforcing a specific morality upon a population who authentically don't share it. You could try that. I'm not sure I would want to help. I currently think that I would help, but if it turns out that so much of humanity's performance of compassion was feigned, I could no longer be confident that I would end up on that side of the border. I'm not even sure that you could be confident that you would remain on that side of the border.
I disagree here. Even though I think it's more likely than not space factory farming won't go on forever, it's not impossible that it will stay, and the chance isn't like vanishingly low. I wrote a post on it.
Also, for cause prioritization., we need to look at the expected values from the tail scenarios. Even if the chances could be as low as 0.5%, or 0.1%, the huge stake might mean the expected values could still be astronomical, which is what I argue for space factory farming. I think what we need to do is to prove why factory farming will go away in the... (read more)