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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...
Hi Lee,
Well, yes, if our ancestors had made better decisions that would have helped.
My impression as an almost ancestor myself, is that previous generations were pretty forward looking in that it was pretty common for people to sacrifice their own needs for the benefit of their children. That's still quite common obviously.
It seems they were forward looking when they launched the Industrial Revolution, they just didn't know all the implications of that at the time.
A great many of our ancestors didn't have the luxury of forward thinking such as we consider it here on the forum. My grandfather's father died of TB when my grandfather was 11. The family was thrown out on the street when they couldn't make the next rent payment, and my grandfather went on to work 6 and half days a week for the rest of his life. He raised 4 kids during the Depression, no small accomplishment. His oldest child will be 100 next week.
Anyway, our ancestors typically had quite a bit on their plates. In spite of that, they built the modern civilization we now enjoy.
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your insightful comment! You're quite right that being able to consider the long term future when making decisions about one's own life requires a certain level of affluence. So I'm sure you're right that most of our ancestors, including mine as well as yours, couldn't afford to do so. My question, however, is less about what actually happened in the past and more about how advocates of longtermism make their argument, whether anyone has put forward this sort of argument, and whether it would be useful to do so. If you have any thoughts about that, I'd love to hear them!
Lee, I'm very new to EA and longtermism, so I'm probably not the best person to address your question. I'm sure you'll find someone here who can though, so just keep asking. Posts tend to vanish in to the void on this site, so the comment section might be a better bet. Good luck!