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This blog post also comments on this question. I think it's got a lot of blind spots, but also a lot of good points! https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/the-expected-value-of-extinction-risk-reduction-is-positive#fn-fn-40
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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...
“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...
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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...
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I think this is a good and important question. I also agree that humanity's predicament in 500 years is wildly unpredictable.
But there are some considerations that can guide our guess:
If you begin totally unsure whether the future is good or bad in expectation, then considerations like these might break the symmetry (while remaining entirely open to the possibility that the future is bad).
This post might also be useful; it recomplicates things by giving some considerations on the other side.
In addition to Fin's considerations and the excellent post by Jacy Anthis, I find Michael Dickens' analysis to be useful and instructive. What We Owe The Future also contains a discussion of these issues.
Thanks for your sharing very much, when I read this, I feel it's a little unnatural, weird. If we discuss long-term future, humans might face aliens, another civilization,superintelligence... Humans' personality may change by evolution. I feel like the prediction is too subjective.
Thanks for your answers very much. In summarize, though the destiny of human is hard to predict, but since human is mostly altruistic, and humans are good at improving our lifes, so it's net positive.It really makes sense to me. But I'm still very unsure about this, because: 1.We may need to consider suffering-focused ethics or cases like hedonic treadmill. 2.Are humans really altruistic? Will we be more selfish if we're facing disasters? 3.Are we too optimistic and naive on our future? I think they are moral uncertainties.