I think Aidan Kankyoku's framing of the debate question from his post is very helpful:

"Even if we think AI will be the decisive factor determining future animal welfare, should we bother with animal-specific interventions in AI? Or can we trust the usual human-centric alignment efforts to take care of animals?"

I'd love to see more discussion on the question considered in this way.

I think there are plenty of crucial sign-flipping considerations pointing both ways (sec. 1 of my post), and that our takes certainly fail to account for some of them, in ways that likely make these takes irrelevant. 

And even if someone's evaluation somehow does not omit a single crucial consideration, they have to make opaque judgment calls on how to weigh up the conflicting pieces of (theoretical and empirical) evidence. I see little reason to believe such judgment calls would do better than chance.

Clarification on what my "0% Agree" means: I confidently disagree that we should believe it'd go well for animals (sec. 1 of my post), but I don't think we should believe the opposite either. I think our cause prio should not rely on any assumption on this question (sec. 2 of my post).

It's true that technological progress so far has been largely good for humans and bad for animals (due to factory farms, but the effects on wild animals complicate this a lot).

But I also think human values towards animals have improved compared to how they were historically, and e.g., house and work animals are likely treated better on the whole now than in the past. So I think there's been some moral progress, but this improvement has been dominated by technology simultaneously making animal food production much more cost-effective (and, as a side-effect, more suffering-producing).

I think eventually technological progress will make it cheaper to act on animal-friendly values, because I'm guessing the taste/price/convenience/friction of animal meat is hitting diminishing returns, while there's much more room for improvement with non-animal-based foods. So I think there will be a crossover point at some point, sort of the way it was with the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, where the economic effects of technology first made many people probably worse off, but eventually the better values won out and people were left better off on the whole.

I separately also think AGI and especially ASI, if aligned with human values, can wisely advise us on good courses of actions and help improve our values and promote good values, which would also help. ASI could also help a lot with wild animal welfare, where we are currently quite at a loss.

The final debate week vote:

I actually would agree with the inverse of this statement:

"If AI goes well for animals, it'll go well for humans"

We are interdependent beings. And yet survival--particularly the contemporary late-capitalist understanding of survival--is treated as zero-sum. This is common amongst social movements: To view success and justice for one group as coming at the expense of another. And while the reality may be that in one snapshot of time, it looks that one is benefitting more than another, if we zoom out and understand how things undulate, it becomes clear that ... (read more)

I'm very uncertain. My main crux is something like: What is the most likely 'AGI'? 

• If we are talking increased productivity/ efficiency, I'd expect that things get worse for animals for a while, and then get better as incentives continue to push us to non-animal agriculture.
• If we are thinking of an intelligence explosion/ uncontrollable machine god then my expectations matter for nought, and my vote is a settled 0%
• If we are thinking of a controllable intelligence explosion/ machine god, then animals might be in the worst position - since revealed human preferences don't seem to be great for animals so far. 

It seems unfortunately plausible that despite technological progress toward alternatives to meat, humans have a revealed terminal preference for animal suffering, which mean that short of extinction we are on a default trajectory to astronomical suffering.

Reminder that you can kick off sub-debates within this discussion thread. Just highlight some text in a comment and then click 'Insert poll':
 

This'd be especially useful as a way to find (and discuss) the cruxes that are driving the different views on this debate. 

Very uncertain on this one, mainly a matter of "I just don't see why it would" and a strong default to "technological process has largely been bad for animals."

I do think the "better" AI goes for humans (or broadly, the more "extreme" the outcome is), the more likely it is that factory farming would basically disappear incidentally.

However, I think a large range of possible futures where AI goes well for humans are (comparably) normal scenarios, in which I just don't have any strong reason to believe that they would go well for animals.

depends a lot on how much control AIs end up having, their values/reasoning, and which (if any) humans end up getting power

I think the answer to this question is too many branches down a tree of possible futures to meaningfully predict. What happens at multiple branch points could swing this either way. If I have time I'll share more about what I mean.

The poll defines "probably" as 70% chance. In this post, I wrote that I thought there was a ~70% chance that AGI would go well for animals.

I guess that means I believe there's a 50% chance that there's a 70% chance that AI goes well for animals? So I should vote in the exact middle of the spectrum?

On priors technology has not been good for animals. So weakly lean against. But could go either way.

My position statement

• As a suffering-focused ethicist who generally rejects moral aggregation across individuals (I am most sympathetic to painism), I have a higher bar for “AGI going well for humans” for humans than many others do; it’s not clear to me that previous technological advances went well for humans
  • Agricultural revolution’s “luxury trap”: going from hunting-gathering to farming allowed humans to consolidate unprecedented wealth and power, but at the cost of the wellbeing/welfare/rights of very many humans
  • Perhaps similar arguments can be made for

Originally, I voted that I slightly agreed, assuming AGI would accelerate developments like cultured meat. Upon further reflection, I realized that advances in technology over the past couple of centuries have been overwhelmingly good for humans but arguably devastating for animals, particularly through factory farming. That makes me lean toward slight disagreement: more powerful technology hasn't automatically meant better outcomes for animals, and there's no guarantee AGI will be the exception.

Here’s how I’m thinking about this:

From the perspective of non-human animals, humanity looks a lot like an unaligned superintelligence. We closely resemble the "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment, where the "paperclips" are narrow human goals. Over millennia, we’ve become incredibly good at optimizing for those goals, but in the process we systematically exclude other sentient beings out of the moral circle and override their most basic interests for benefits that are often trivial.

Given this reality, without a fundamental shift in our ethics, superin... (read more)

If AI is successfully aligned to "human values", that would include animal agriculture and conservationist ideology, perpetuating and potentially expanding nonhuman animal suffering to other planets even while humans thrive.

My definition of going well for humans: for the existing population, there would be a re-allocation of resources. Food and water would be rationally distributed based on basic needs, and once basic needs are all met, based on wealth (or the ability to generate progress for the society). 

With this as a premise, I think 1) there would be no need for factory farming, and 2) the welfare of all, including animals, would be rebalanced. 

For point 2), I very much think the lack of welfare of animals is reflective of the lack of welfare in humans themselves

The epoch of superintelligence will not result in any meaningful improvements in animal welfare. Previous epochs of humanity, marked by transformative advancements such as the industrial and digital revolutions, have failed to yield meaningful improvements in animal welfare. If anything, these shifts created novel pathways for animal exploitation or rendered existing models, such as animal husbandry, vastly more lethal and efficient through the rise and continued development of factory farming. Unless there is a massive societal-level dietary shift, which ... (read more)

I worry I'm too pessimistic in general, but the world economy (and general living standards), have improved significantly over time, and farmed animal welfare seems to be a lot worse. That seems to be evidence to me that amazing technological progress won't be sufficient for animal welfare progress.  

I am extremely uncertain on this point. While there is a possibility that an aligned AI could be immensely beneficial for animals, I believe this is an outcome we absolutely cannot take for granted.

Broadly speaking, it is difficult to assess such a scenario without knowing the specific form an 'aligned' AI will take and what a world where humans coexist with an AGI or ASI will actually look like. As some have pointed out, if this AI were to simply 'lock in' current human values indefinitely, it would likely be really bad for animals.

It seems probable, howe... (read more)

If we take things as they stand at the moment, AGI going well for humans doesn’t translate to AGI going well for animals. There is however a world where AGI has been trained in such a manner that it recognises sentience as its metric for moral consideration, which in turn would result in AGI going well for humans and for animals alike.

Say we define "going well" simply as "better than the status quo",  for a human, "going well" might mean radical life extension or a post-scarcity economy. With the status quo for animals (especially factory farmed anima... (read more)

I'd really like it if AI resulted in amazing plant based or cultured meat, and that the general abundance coming from AI means that people can focus their thinking on morality, not just making their lives go okay. 

BUT, so far, new tech and improved economical situations have caused farmed animal suffering to get worse.

So I have a big uncertainty, but lean disagree. 
 

I'm reading "goes well for humans" as including "goes well for human values broadly, accounting for further refinement of human values".

Not by default. I think humans by in large, don't care much about animals enough for this to work

I don't have a singular directional intuition about this.

1. I'm not sure AGI isn't already here.
2. There are some scenarios where AGI liberates us from constraints and others where it enables humans to extend their dominance over animals. Who can say?
3. In the meantime, AI does not absolve us of helping animals.
4. Something about this topic creates a semantic stop sign for people whose opinions I otherwise find interesting. So even if the subject interesting in the abstract, I'm afraid here and now it sometimes leads to worse discussions.

I take "AGI goes well" to imply a wealthy and technologically advanced society. I think that could mean:

- Very cheap and delicious meat alternatives.
- Factory farming waning as it reaches inefficiencies and bottlenecks, not able to compete with the above.
- More demand for higher-welfare options like free-range and local produce.

But it also seems possible that we "lock in" factory farming and scale it further and that AGI adopts speciesist views.

Very uncertain, I don't find myself strongly disagreeing with claims across the spectrum.

I'm quite uncertain, but in general I don't think it's been the case that "if X technology goes well for humans, it'll go well for animals". I think in some key cases, it's been the exact opposite, actually—e.g., industrialization leading to the rise of factory farming and killing/causing suffering to many more animals.

However, I also don't think that AGI is going to be quite different from most technologies, at least in some ways (and definitely as it goes past AGI to ASI), and so I'm quite uncertain about how "going well for humans" might positively impa... (read more)

TL;DR: I don't think there's sufficient evidence to make such a claim.

It could go either way, but because the statement is phrased positively, I disagree. I think it's more likely to improve the conditions of non-human animals than not, because I think it may accelerate lab-grown meat (dairy, eggs, etc.) technology to the point where it becomes cheaper than farmed meat, in which case the conditions of animals will considerably improve. However, if this doesn't occur, AGI could further increase animal farming and efficiency, considerably worsening the condi... (read more)

AGI could, in principle, find solutions for the key problems that animals face, but I would argue the main issue is that it won't automatically enlighten humans.

I would estimate my disagreement at roughly 90% to 95%.

Default human values are largely indifferent or actively hostile to the suffering of non-human animals.

Humanity currently oversees massive amounts of animal suffering through factory farming &habitat destruction.

If an AGI would be perfectly aligned to make things "go well" for humans, it will likely prioritize human flourishing, economic growth + resource acquisition. If human preferences do not drastically shift toward minimizing animal suffering, an AGI will have no inherent reason to protect ani... (read more)

Vibes, I have no idea, I hope someone convinces me with good takes

Two ways it goes well for animals:

1. As incomes rise globally, initially it's worse for animals because demand for meat rises. But once incomes rise from high to very high, desire for high-welfare standard meat increases and factory farming is eventually outlawed (not everywhere, but almost).

2. Economic development spurred on by AGI leads to further displacement of wild habitats, reducing wild animal suffering.

I think it 70% likely will go well for animals, but that's not enough to obviate the need for animal-specific alignment efforts. Full take: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/skdp9uB4AoyN2fnuu/animal-welfare-is-just-part-of-ai-alignment-now-and-both

Successful CEV likely to lead to improved outcomes for animals

Slightly leaning toward that moral progress in that area would become so cheap that people accept it.

Seems like AGI will lead to ASI and ASI will show us more valuable ways to use all the land and matter that currently support animal suffering. The ways we use those probably won't involve animals or suffering at all.

ES: not professional, not sure

IMO if AGI goes well for humans then at least it would have a decent grasp for general ethics, which includes animal welfare. AGI that hasn't got good ethics wouldn't benefit human, they'd just paperclip around. Since I have a short-ish timeline, i think somewhat-ethical and empowered AGI will benefit animals more than speciest HGIs.

I don't think this is guaranteed, but if AI goes well and is used to develop better tasting, healthier, and more cost effective cultivated meat, it will be more likely to be adopted and will reduce reliance on factory farmed animals.

On the other hand, wild animals could be preserved as they are or spread throughout the galaxy, potentially increasing net suffering.

I think AI going well would leave a lot of this up to human choice and is therefore uncertain.

Due to Value Lock-in, TAI poses a time constraint for farmed animal social progress.

I do not expect most issues to be resolved before this time, due to technological limitations, heightened barriers to social change relative to historic movements, and increasing developing world meat consumption. 

If we open this up to wild animals rather than just farmed, net-negative outcomes are much more assured.

"Goes well for humans" (i.e for a very long time) worlds are mostly worlds where AGI is fully theoretically and empirically aligned with a CEV-shaped alignment target, which for me logically requires animal welfare. (I also currently believe those worlds to be implausible because no company seems focused on this)

I struggle to imagine any deliberative or reflective-preference oriented process that does not give the right answer to the animal welfare question. If it doesn't care about non-human animals, then it means animals are not sentient, or that the CEV... (read more)

The timelines where agi goes well would probably 10x the resources required to improve animal welfare. It will probably be similar to just "buying shrimp stunners" for the shrimp farmers who are indifferent.

See my post:

We are AGI to animals now, and we may be net negative as a species. See my short post for intuition pump

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/et6tWRzgXHBHRciuN/quick-pig-based-intuition-pump-on-superintelligence-and?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link

AGI going well for humans in my mind suggests we all get uplifted as much as we like into some post-scarcity utopia, and if that happens I can't imagine animals getting a different outcome. It may be delayed, it may look different, we may not even have direct control or understanding of it, but it seems implausible that for some reason superintelligence deems humans uniquely important compared to other biological sentience.

We haven't done so well for animals thus far.  that said, I hope that super-intelligence will respect all intelligences

(Copied from my Symposium position statement)

If I accept conventional assumptions in EA Animal welfare^[1], AGI will be negative for animals in expectation. On the other hand, AGI being good for humans makes it worse for animals in expectation. However, both rogue AGI and human-friendly AGI seem positive for animals in most scenarios: it just happens that the "bad" scenarios seem much worse than the "good" scenario.

Why is that? AGI, whether rogue or human-aligned, may not decide to keep other planets free of biological animals (though it seems like a bigger... (read more)

So far, much of technological development seems to have gone well for humans - for example, in developed nations, we have never had to do less hard manual labour, or had access to more information. That has not led to an improvement in the quality of non-human animal lives. In fact, we have seen exactly the opposite. AGI is likely to amplify this effect unless we make a significant conscious and coordinated effort to steer it another direction.

hedonic utilitarianism, an aligned superintelligence solves metaethics and fills the universe with hedonium.

I appreciate there's a lot of nuance in the question but some rough thoughts:

1. Number of ways AGI goes well for humans and good for animals < number of ways AGI goes well for humans and bad for animals.
2. Moral expansion or inclusion of animals is not obvious to me to be guaranteed (in near or long term future). And I think there's a lot of people today (eg other cultures and generations) who don't or negligibly value animal welfare.
3. Short of a AGI utopia with unlimited resources, I think there will be tradeoffs between animals and human considerations where

I expect that factory farming will become even more harmful as a result of AGI

AGI "goes well" or not is to me an X-risk question. Which makes me read this question as:

> If we survive AGI, are animals likely to be better off than if they were extinct?

To which I answer: Probably yes.

What does "going well" mean? 

It seems plausible that many things could be a lot better, like making factory farming obsolete. Does that mean that animals are no longer experiencing extreme suffering? What is our baseline for animal welfare?

Factory farming has gone up along with the same forces of economic expansion that have made things go better for humans over the last 80 years. I don't see any fundamental reason that AI would change these trends.

I don't want to be a pessimist here, so I slightly moved my avatar to the right... I hope it will be good for animals...

I don't really know, but my starting model would be... unless AGI is applying utilitarian models, it would likely rate human welfare well above and beyond animal one, in enough orders of magnitude as to make any animal welfare insignificant. The developments could allow for an end of farmed meat and the like, but that would also make the need to have animals as such... mostly redundant? You might have reservations for animals... Dunno.

If AGI takes on the same values as humanity as a whole, factory-farming will continue, this means it would not go well for the animals.

Value lock-in is the central variable. If AGI leads to lock-in of current human values, then humans may suvive while animals keep suffering. 

If by "AGI goes well" we also include the continuation of things like moral progress (which current AI existential safety work does NOT address!), then the two are indeed aligned.

A couplet different potential mechanisms could help farmed animals:

• Solving cultivated meat or brainless animals
• Creating better welfare technologies (e.g. solving all disease issues on current farms)
• Generating enough societal wealth to make welfare improvements  like lowering stocking density trivial

More abstractly, people generally care about welfare so it will be one of the things that an aligned AGI optimizes for. However, it wont be optimal for animals because AGI won't be directly optimizing for welfare. For example, most people don't think it's w... (read more)

The good news is that life on Earth has been going better and better for humans over the millennia. For instance, we have technology that make it easy to grow tons and tons of food so lots of people can eat as much as they want. We have cures for lots of previously deadly diseases so lots of us humans can live a very long time. And lots of people live in countries that recognize their rights. We also have a robust international economy that makes it really easy for a large number of people to buy the goods and services they want—and for lots of other peopl... (read more)

No particular strong reason, this is my intuition but curious to see people's reasoned takes.

If AGI goes well for humans, this will likely mean a lot of technological development. This would likely include technologies allowing for products equal to or superior on the dimensions humans like, that don't have the animal welfare entailments. I realize that there have been some arguments that people would still prefer products created through suffering even if alternatives could be just as cheap, satisfying, and convenient, but I think that attitudes would change in the medium to long-term if those conditions were met.

I dont agree to the fact that AGI will go well for humans and hence I am disagreeing. And if it doesnt go well for humans, it wont go well for animals as well. Here the logic is simple, humans are also animals.