Have you considered trying to offer this on food delivery apps? India has a lot of infrastructure for making it easy to find vegetarian products in their apps, I’ve found it very useful :)

(Even in the roles where it has produced productivity improvements, such as programming, that doesn’t necessarily imply job loss, as companies could get more ambitious with their existing budgets)

Are there also just, concerns about misinterpretation? There’s not really a good way of checking baselines on hallucinations or unconfident predictions from the AI, since 99% of humans don’t know what these sounds mean.

Furthermore, since these seem to be based on the behaviours humans observe co-occurring with the communication, they’d necessarily be lower-fidelity than that animal’s thought process (as you note). That seems a bit lame and the website certainly isn’t trying to dispel their own mythmaking around ‘talk to animals’, which isn’t really what’s happening here in any meaningful sense.

Hmm, I think that’s not the right framing for this. UBI is just not settled as a universally good idea in academic or political circles (sorry, no definitive citation for this), let alone that there’s an urgent unemployment crisis (the statistic I think you’re citing is for job openings, not actual employment rates) or that such a crisis, if it did exist, has structural causes which could be expected to increase (i.e. it might not be AI, nor should we necessarily expect AI to become orders of magnitude more advanced in the next 5 years; there was plausibly a very different shock to the global economic system beginning around Liberation Day, 2025).

I’d also be curious about whether Abundance money could fund this, too. Urban sprawl is a big driver of habitat destruction!

That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.

I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.

Well the blackouts are the only way to ensure a free & fair election Nick :)

Late to this, but something I didn’t catch in the comments—Global Health looks overfunded in your calculations, but my sense is that Global Health is quite efficient at spending money. Much of the money in global health goes directly to programmes and beneficiaries, or working-class talent that often gets excluded as ‘not what we mean’ in these kinds of surveys. I would argue, too, that the other cause areas here are often quite talent-dense. Under these terms, it’s probably still valid to argue that Animal Welfare is under-resourced relative to Existential Risks though :)

Just generally, I like the idea of putting something out there in the world even if the first version isn’t perfect :)