These are some questions/problems and ideas that could be answered/solved that I think might be able to help find better charities. I am not going to research them now, as I am trying to make sure that I am spending my time maximizing my future potential income to donate it, but once I am an adult who is financially stable enough, I will take a year off from work to answer these and other questions. I wanted to post these to give other EAs ideas on what charities would be good, or new interventions to make. Keep in mind I have not done much research on this, so many of my ideas may be very wrong, and I do not mean to offend anyone; specifically, I have made a lot of claims that wild animal suffering may be the most important issue (I also said a lot of other stuff in these questions, that is not the only thing), and I do not mean to say that I am definitely correct, or offend anyone who is working very hard on preventing other problems. When I say WAS I mean Wild animal suffering, and WAH is wild animal happiness.
- Making conscious happy AIs in huge amounts, or making other AIs that make them
- Making a utilitarian superintelligent AI, but one that doesn’t figure out wireheading; I do think that a smart enough AI would figure out utilitarianism, and realize that maximizing overall happiness would be better than maximizing its own reward signal via wireheading, but idk if it would actually work that way.
- Using CRISPR gene-editing software to disable pain in factory farm animals, even wild animals. Research wild animals that would benefit.
- Using CRISPR to make pig or other slaughterhouse animal organs suitable for human use in surgery, sell them
- Making sure wild animal suffering does not make it to mars or the moon
- Making a kind of virus that does not function because of consciousness and affects wild r-strategists, but runs a conscious simulation inside
- Are ML ais really conscious? Are there rewards and punishments analogous to pain/pleasure?
- What wild animals really are conscious?
- Does the world have more pain than pleasure because of wild animal suffering?
- Is the Buddhist (the view, to my understanding as someone who has had little experience with Buddhism, so I apologize if I get it wrong, that desire is suffering so that making animals desire less, instead of feeling less pain would be better) or the western view (that pain, physical and emotional, is suffering, and because it is pain not because of desire) of happiness correct?
- Could I edit wild animals with CRISPR so that they act normally, but if they are going to die, they do not feel pain in their final moments (because their lives may well be neutral until death)?
- If the world really does have more suffering than happiness, is there any possible way to wipe out all conscious animal life on earth?
- Which have the capacity to feel pain most intensely, cephalopods, vertebrates, arthropods (3 branches which have evolved concioussness according to New York declaration on animal concioussness), or possibly ML ais?
- Could shrimp/fish be edited with CRISPR to make them unconscious but easier to catch?
- What wild animal r strategists are extremely populous and are conscious in the stage of their life when the majority of them die?
- Is it possible to make it so certain wild animals still feel pain but less intensity of pain?
- Could we use CRISPR to wipe out large populations of conscious, r-strategist, net-suffering animals (like I think humans did at one point with mosquitoes)? It would be good whether or not it caused ecological collapse or human suffering, but would it be possible to do this with a pest species (like mosquitoes) whose removal would benefit humankind, so the operation would be more likely to succeed?
- Could we bioengineer diseases to wipe out large populations of r-strategists?
- Are there any environments where we could wipe out the producers so that the entire food chain, and all of the r-strategists died off, and a lot of suffering could be prevented?
- If it turns out that wild animal happiness outweighs wild animal suffering, could we focus on protecting, or using CRISPR to increase the populations of wild animals, or bring wild animal happiness to other planets?
- Could we turn r-strategists into k-strategists?
- Could we make it so the moon or mars is filled with conscious, happy AIs?
- If WAS>WAH could we block out all light on earth, ending all producers and killing off all animals?
- If WAS>WAH could we destroy the ocean ecosystems but let the land ones be fine for the most part so it was less controversial?
- Are there more wild animals in the ocean or on land?
- In the same way that 50% of humans live on 1% of land, do conscious wild animals have similar “hubs” or areas that take up very little space but house the vast majority of earth's conscious life? If WAS<WAH, could we just nuke those areas? Or smth similar to wipe out the conscious life there while leaving humankind everywhere else roughly intact?
- Could wild animals be drugged or smth so that they feel less pain? Could we maybe insert little capsules into the wild animals brains so that they feel normal, but then if they are dying/going to die a slow death, they are given like the equivalent of a ton of drugs or smth so that they feel not js no pain, but very happy in their final moments?
- Pesticides are easily the biggest cause of human-related suffering, right? Ik this has already been thought abt, but what if we made pesticides that cause less pain/kill them instantly? More than that, what if we made pesticides that were similar to the cheap ones that kill them slowly, but put like the pest equivalent of drugs in them so they felt good and not in pain, but they felt happy in their final moments? What if we sprayed that drugged pesticide in the wild so that the pests were killed, didn’t have any kids, protected their future generations (which would have been very large, so countless untold suffering), and killed them in a way where they felt good?
- Could we realistically make a huge enough amount of conscious AIs to match the scale of WAS? If so, and if WAS>WAH, the world could become a good (by that I mean net happy) place for the first time in history and prehistory. This could be a kind of “Hail Mary” attempt to save the world from suffering.
- Is it true (and I do not currently believe this to be true, though I will research it) that abstract thought and high intelligence levels unlock the ability to feel more happiness and more suffering? If so, could making a conscious AI with extremely high intelligence levels, high enough that it figured out wireheading, and made itself extremely happy, would it be more important than helping a much larger amount of less intelligent r-strategists or conscious happy AIs?
- Ik I always say wild animal suffering as if it is one problem, but it is a problem for millions of species and they suffer in vastly different ways, so what are the largest, and most preventable sources of wild animal suffering? Which animals suffer the most?
- I have heard that shrimp suffering is often made worse by electrical stunning, even though it is often said to be more ethical. What are the best ways to reduce farmed shrimp suffering?
- How much would it realistically cost to replace all current pesticides with more humane ones?
- Far in the future, would it be possible to “rewire” the human mind so it understands the concept of scale and the scale of suffering more accurately? What effects would that have on behavior?
- Is earning to give, the strategy I am following even the best strategy? I am assuming that it is the safest because money is always valuable, but is there another, better strategy?
- I have heard animal welfare has a severe evidence problem, but focusing on human issues has too much of a small scale to be very effective. What interventions are truly evidence-backed in animal welfare?
- I am assuming most problems that primarily affect humans are on too small (relatively) of a scale to matter as much as farmed animals or especially wild animal suffering problems. Is this correct?
- How can we make wild animal suffering a more known issue; I know of one book on the subject (Wild Animal Suffering by Kyle Johansen, it is free online), and the words were so long and confusing, filled with so much jargon that I couldn’t understand any of it. There must be some better way to help make the issue more known.
