Gabe The Ape
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Hey, have you written out your reasoning for why you believe shrimp have a 20% chance of sentience? I appreciate all the work you have done in this space, and am curious how you approach this.
I appreciate you taking the time to write this James. It was refreshing to read.
However, I am not sure that impact is often measurable. What evidence do you have for that intuition? Can you provide any examples to illuminate this point?
My prior is that measurement in the social sciences is really, really hard, and people often update too much on social science statistics. And that the social world has a lot of uncertainty. It seems that people update too much on them because the social scientists who end up promoting findings to the public aren't that forthcoming about their limitations and the ongoing disagreements in the field. One examples is social media's affect of minors' mental health, and the ongoing debate between Jon Haidt and Candice Odgers.
I appreciate y'all continuing to think about this, and this is a solid draft as it got my brain thinking which is what good drafts do.
some thoughts:
A) "Science and technology could accelerate farmed animal welfare work, especially through alternative proteins." There seems to be implication here that powerful AI equates to a greater likelihood of the end of factory farming. Perhaps, but I think there is also an argument to make that conventional factory farming could benefit from powerful AI as much or more so (it doesn't suffer from a number of limitations that alt-proteins face). To have more faith in powerful AI helping alt-proteins net more than factory farming, I would like to see a robust attempt at making the case that it will help factory farming more.
B) "As AI's capabilities in causal inference and behavioral prediction grow, all kinds of high-quality, granular data (for example, on consumer behavior, psychological drivers, policy responses, and market trends) will be incredibly valuable. Rather than only measuring direct impacts, campaigns can be designed to capture rich behavioral data and test messaging at scale, feeding into AI models that refine strategies and uncover new leverage points. Done well, today’s direct work could reduce short-term animal suffering while also serving as the training ground for smarter, faster advocacy in the years ahead."
I would love to see this expanded on as well because to me feels like these arguments at face value are getting into powerful AI as magic territory.
"[...] campaigns can be designed to capture rich behavioral data and test messaging at scale." This implies there is rich-enough data that could be captured today. That seems far from obvious to me. Some of the reason the social media well-being research is so constrained is because of the privacy concerns that would come with getting rich enough data to answer some of the well being questions with confidence. And social media or digital environments generally are an ideal environments because there is so much data, but (A) it is not clear how useful all that data is at changing behavior, especially a complex behavior like voting or diet, and (B) a lot of the behavior the animal welfare movement is interested happens offline (we would need to make the offline word much more data rich in types and invade privacy even more) and (C) of the rich data that currently exists offline and online exists in various silos and combining them isn't necessarily technological issues, but a political and social one in some aspects. In addition, it is also a problem within the animal welfare movement because it would take really good project and data management, which are skill sets that hard to come by.
But even if you had (A) incredibly rich behavioral data that was practically achievable to get and (B) at a cost our movement could afford it and had the operational capacity, it is not obvious the epistemic metaphysics of social science would allow for anything close to a social science Laplace's demon, which using data to change voting and diet seems close to IMO. There might be hard limits to what is possible to know in the social sciences, and therefore ability to influence behavior, whether we are in a world where AGI exists or doesn't.
An example of possible limitations would be how RCTs are required for studying a social science intervention in a statistically robust way, but also might be crippling said intervention's ability from having even medium-sized impact in the world at scale, which is the scale we are interested in. See: Cause, Effect, and The Structure Of The Social World by Megan T. Stevenson: (paper) H/T Seth Green. I'm not saying that is the definitely the case but I don't think it is safe to assume it isn't, and is worthy of exploring before saying AGI would be incredibly valuable for the animal welfare movement's ability to understand and influence behavior.
Approved GMO Cultivated Meat
Your comments are giving me ideas for forecasting questions:
- Will the first cultivated meat GMO product contain GMOs?
- What percentage of the first 10 cultivated meats approved by US regulators will contain GMOs?
Are GMO cell lines important for scaling? I don't know, but I agree it likely makes it easier. I need to look into this more.
Somebody to watch on this note is Meatly who is selling GMO-free cultivated meat pet food in Europe and Asia. And I have a somewhat uncertain belief cultivated pet food will reach larger scale faster than cultivated meat for humans so could be a preview.
Btw, found this map of GMO grown around the world (here)
Trump and Cultivated Meat
You have a valid point that they regulatory agencies are not more public-facing politicians, but it does show that the power dynamics in MAGA are far from completely against cultivated meat. (A little review of that here)
I have only done some searching, but it is worth noting CATO has came out against state bans, and Vivek Ramaswamy has been very pro it (though it is unclear me how much power he holds in MAGA, he might run for a governorship though).
It is worth noting some of those Republican officials who are doing things that seem part of the culture war, like mandated labels, also think it will become part of the American diet. "The way we’re headed, lab-grown meat is going to become a part of life whether we like it or not,” said Neyer, R-Shepherd. “But we have to make sure people have the ability to choose whether they consume it or not." (source)
Btw, I would appreciate it if you would consider making a forecast related to state bans-- see here. Your view point would make a healthy counter to my more bullish views.
Other
A big reason why people don't like GMOs is because of their associations with pesticides and chemicals, and the concern about pesticides is much more general than GMOs. RFK Jr. said cultivated meat was "pesticide-laden ingredients" which is absurd. Why would you need pesticides when the food is grown in a sparking clean lab? Especially compared to the all the crops animals need to eat.
So pesticides and chemicals, specifically the lack of coming in contact with them, could be a very large selling point for some of the public (5% to 20% i would guess). A decent portion of Americans are reasonable and aren't anti-vax, and would be open to hearing out this line of persuasion in my opinion.
Because sentience is a binary question, and intensity of subjective experience is a scale, I feel like that should also be asked separately. People might being conflating the two by giving a low confidence probability in sentience, when they really mean they are sentience but just have experiences which aren't that intense.