I don't understand why you (and Ben / Lizka) think we shouldn't focus on farmed animals in a post-TAI world, can you explain a little more? 

It seems to me that regardless of how weird the world gets (which I'm on board with), if AGI is aligned, then humans will still be around. And if the post-TAI humans are mostly the same as the pre-TAI humans, what makes you confident that they wouldn't want meat from farmed animals?

Looking at current human preferences around animal products, there's a strong "naturalistic" push - people want their animal products to come from environments that are as "natural" as possible (e.g. outdoor access, no hormones or antibiotics, etc). It seems like lots of people think cultivated meat is weird and gross, and could feel the same way about any other kind of technology that looks significantly different than traditional animal production. Perhaps TAI will be able to convince people to not feel this way, but it seems just as likely to me that this preference will be amplified and animal protein production will look more similar to the current day than you're anticipating. 

You call out the excerpt about the political pushback to cultivated meat, and I agree with you that this probably isn't what will cause cultivated meat to fail post-TAI. More likely in my mind is that people won't want cultivated meat (as evidenced by the fact that they currently don't want it), or any other super tech-y seeming solution to protein production. So it seems to me that thinking about what farming might look like post-TAI at least deserves a spot on the list of possible strategies for for having positive impact on animals in light of ASI.

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 wrong to eat meat, and we might still not want do things like beneficial vaccines or genetic edits.

Wild animals, less clear though!

This seems like an interesting and important point, thanks for writing.

I might nitpick the way you're characterizing the terrestrial animal case though. Layers and broilers may technically be the same species, but I think they're different enough that a lot of the same considerations apply from the fish case. For example, you mention cage-free as the paradigm scalable intervention, but actually they only apply to layers, which I'm guessing constitute less than 5% of global terrestrial animals (most are broilers). Applying a similar intervention to broilers (BCC) has been less successful than for layers.

Speaking just about the US, I would say there are actually four groups of poultry worth considering. The following are their population sizes and days spent on form from this population per year (US):

1. Broilers - 9.3b individuals, 437b days on farm / year
2. Layers - 311m individuals, 113b days on farm / year
3. Breeders - 77m individuals, 28b days on farm / year
4. Turkeys - 200m individuals, 27b days on farm / year

This is much more homogenous than aquatic animals, but it's not quite as homogenous as you made it seem!

Academic studies are definitely slow, but 3-5 years strikes me as extremely slow, even for academia. 

I'm generally on board with what you're describing but I wonder whether there's also opportunities to work better with academia? Like if you're the one providing the funding, you might be able to negotiate with them and keep them accountable to timelines. There's probably also lots of variability between academics so you can identify the ones that are capable of executing well and quickly, and then work with them. 

I've seen AI-based animal communication technologies starting to be involved in some EA events / discussions (e.g. https://www.earthspecies.org/ ). I'm worried these initiatives may be actively negative, and I'm wondering if anyone has / will articulate a stronger defense of why they're good?

The high-level argument I've heard is that communicating with animals will make humans be more empathetic towards them. But I don't see why this would be the most likely outcome:

1. Humans are already fairly empathetic to animals, especially around things that we'd consider important welfare issues. We don't need a hen to articulately describe why she'd prefer not to have her beak cut off or be kept in a cage, I think it would be fairly obvious to most people.
2. Animals might become less sympathetic if we knew what they were saying. It seems possible that most of their thoughts and words are about food, sex, and ingroup / outgroup dynamics. 

A similar argument is that communication would allow us to see that animals are actually intelligent, but again I don't see why this is necessarily the case. If their thoughts are things people would generally consider crude, it's possible people would become more confident in their lack of intelligence (despite still deserving moral consideration).

More importantly, a large effect of being able to communicate with animals is that they'll become more useful to humans. If animals had political power or legal rights, this might open the door to mutually beneficial trade. But in reality, they don't have these things, so it seems more likely that this would allow humans to exploit these species more easily. They reason chickens, cows, and pigs are in such a bad state is because they're very useful to humans, and I'm worried animal communication technologies will subject more species to similar fates.

It doesn't seem to me like AI could radically change the economics of higher welfare products / alternative proteins without other broader transformative effects, or at least if it does, it seems like it would be for a pretty brief period of time before things get very weird. So I think "past X years" ( to use the framework of your comments) there should be heavy discounting and I wouldn't recommend a save and invest strategy. So to address your four types of interventions:

• Short-term, large payoff interventions are going to look good under any model of the world, I'd go further and suggest short-term, small/medium payoff interventions may start to look better.
• Interventions actively seeking to navigate and benefit animals through an AI transition - I'm skeptical of tractability here, but I'm supportive of the general idea
• Interventions that robustly invest in movement capacity - I would think that short timelines actually push us against capacity building on the margin, curious what you meant here
• Interventions that seem unlikely to change through an AI transition - again skeptical of the tractability, but I support the general idea

Organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.

I appreciate you championing this view Vasco, despite all the pushback. I found your reasoning pretty convincing, and it seems to me like if it's wrong, it will be because of more general philosophical problems with utilitarianism or expected value reasoning. 

I agree with this, although I'm not an expert on cattle rearing. It seems to me like cows on grazeland generally have net positive lives, and cows on feedlots have arguably net negative lives (although it still seems way less bad than a pig or chicken CAFO). The longer a cow spends on pasture the more likely they had a net positive life, e.g. 100% grass-fed cows in the US might have pretty decent lives. 

I agree that the elections results were disappointing for animals, and particularly that the EATS act seems significantly more likely to pass in a republican-controlled government.

However, I think you're a little too pessimistic on what this means for animal-focused policy work in general. The ballot initiatives that failed this cycle were mostly abolitionist / vegany in vibe, which I think is significantly less popular than initiatives that are welfarist in vibe like Prop 12.

The EATS Act is primarily pushed by industry lobbyists, and doesn't necessarily reflect that these sorts of laws are getting less popular.