Crosspost.
If you’re serious about helping animals, you should be almost entirely concerned with making sure the far future goes well for animals.
The core argument for Longtermism is that the future is huge! There could be countless future generations that our actions might affect. Thus, in expectation, for every one present individual affected by your actions, there are countless affected future individuals. If you want to maximize your positive impact, you should care a lot about the impact you have on the future—because that is most of the impact that you have.
This argument applies to animals just as much as it does to humans. In expectation, vastly more animals will live in the far future than live in the present day. If we’re concerned about animals, we should be very concerned with making sure the future is good for animals. That’s even more important than stopping present animal suffering. An animal being tortured in a factory farm a thousand years from now is just as tragic as one being tortured in a factory farm today.
Because the future is so huge, taking it seriously has pretty nutty implications. For example, one extremely conservative estimate found:
Reducing the probability of spreading [wild animal suffering] to one other planet by 0.1% has an expected value equivalent to stopping all suffering caused by exploiting animals for food on Earth for over a thousand years.
My guess is that this estimate is too low by many orders of magnitude. But the basic logic is straightforward: if we bring animal suffering to a new planet, there could be suffering until some cosmic catastrophe ends life on that planet. This could mean billions of years of suffering. Actions that nudge the probability of spreading suffering to other planets almost totally dominate actions on factory farming (though ending factory farming is one good way of stopping future animal suffering).
And note: animal Longtermism is primarily about stopping extreme suffering in the future. It is a lot more obvious that preventing future extreme suffering is important than it is that creating lots of happy people is important. So the premises on which the case for animal Longtermism rests are pretty conservative.
The future is big enough that if the animal movement wants to make things go well for animals, they can for all practical purposes ignore what will happen near-term, except insofar as it affects the probability of things going well long term. The short-term impact of the animal movement is likely to be basically non-existent compared to their impact in the very long term.
So what is it that those in the animal movement should do?
First, it’s really important that we don’t spread factory farming or wild animal suffering to space. If you think animals live bad lives, making sure we don’t fill countless planets with the screams of innocent terrified animals is hugely important. Preventing intergalactic factory farms is a no-brainer.
Second, we need to make AI concerned about animal welfare. We are currently building gods of metal; it is reasonably likely that they’ll be indifferent to almost all the well-being and suffering in the world. This is partly for the sake of animals. AI is likely to soon become extremely powerful. Making sure that the digital beings who will dominate the future aren’t indifferent to animal welfare is of vital importance.
My friend Adria Moret has a piece written alongside Peter Singer and two other people that makes this case in more detail and talks about how it could work. In my view, getting AI models to have concern for animals is the #1 near-term priority for animal welfare. If I could trade a doubling of factory farming for getting all AIs firmly and reliably committed to its abolition, I would take that trade. Kudos to both OpenAI and Anthropic for including concern for animals in their model specs.
There’s also a more self-interested reason to make AI concerned about animal welfare: if AIs internalize norms that neglect the interests of alternative species that are much dumber than them, then they would neglect our interests once they become superintelligent. It is thus important that AIs take every sentient being seriously. If you want to get more involved, I recommend attending Sentient Futures conferences and applying to work for organizations like Sentient Futures or the NYU Center for Mind Ethics and Policy. The welfare alignment project, in particular, is thinking through AI alignment for animals in a very serious and responsible way.
Third, trying to increase compassion for animals—especially neglected animals like shrimp and wild animals—is likely to make the future go well for animals. A world that cares more about the welfare of animals is less likely to harm them gratuitously without a good reason.
This also supports efforts to work on particular animal welfare causes that might stick. So, for example, I think Screwworm Free Future is a great charity to support. Screwworms are horrible—they lay eggs inside live animals, so that little maggots devour their victims from the inside. Screw screwworms! Here’s Kevin Esvelt, who pioneered the use of CRISPR in gene drives, summarizing the situation:
So you have this macabre dance of parasitisation that results in the animal being devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots. And we know that it’s horrendously painful, because people get affected by this, and the standard of treatment is you give them morphine immediately so that surgeons can cut the things out — because it’s just that painful; it’s unbelievably agonising. And by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, there’s about a billion hosts of this every year — so a billion animals are devoured alive by flesh-eating maggots every single year.
If we assume that eradicating these would prevent a million years of screwworm infestations, then that would affect about 10^15 animals (ignoring the effects on the screwworms themselves). That’s about the number of animals that would be farmed in 12,000 years of factory farming. For this reason, it is plausible that eradicating the new world screwworm would be better than ending factory farming.
If we’re serious about wanting to benefit animals, we should mostly be concerned with how our actions affect them over long time scales. If your animal welfare intervention has no chance of making things better more than a hundred years out, you should probably stop doing it. Fortunately, a lot of standard animal welfare interventions push the world in a more pro animal direction, making it likelier we’ll get a future that’s good for animals.
The scale of future animal suffering is truly incomprehensible. This is one of the big challenges that we’ll need to solve to get a good future, and it’s the most important challenge in the animal welfare space. For this reason, if you’re an animal advocate reading this, I cannot implore you enough to think hard about the far future.
If you want to read more about this subject, I recommend these two pieces. If you want to get involved, feel free to send me a Substack dm.
