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...
How does Animal Welfare/Global Health affect AI Safety? Very brief considerations.
I think someone might build super strong AI in the next few years, and this could affect most of the value of the future. If true, I think it implies that the majority of any value from an intervention or cause area comes from how it affects whether AI goes well. Even if that's very slight and indirect. Relatedly, I think whether AI goes well depends on whether states will be able to coordinate.
How do Animal Welfare interventions affect whether AI goes well?
– I think the Moral Circle expansion is relevant.
– Helping reach climate targets seems relevant to help with international coordination.
– But I think that Animal Welfare interventions place a cost on society such as by raising the price of food and increasing pressure on our governments in high-income countries.
How do Global Health interventions affect whether AI goes well?
– I think that it reduces the pressure on governments in LMICs and gives them a safer society. This gives their Governments slightly more room to come to peaceful international agreements.
– But it may also enable more people to contribute to AI, whether that be AI capabilities development, chip manufacture (or AI safety/governance)
Overall, I slightly lean towards global health being better. Perhaps RP's tools shed light on this. (I haven't checked!)