A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first.

Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction. More money, more people willing to start things, more urgency. 

But the conclusion I draw is a little different. The new philanthropic wave shouldn’t go hunting for problems in completely new places: it should look harder within one it already named and set aside, within an all-encompassing field that history reduced to a single term too small to carry its gravity.

Far more of the new philanthropic wave should go to helping animals. It should go to the trillions of lives in all their variety and multitude. “Animal welfare” isn’t one solved issue to cross off: it’s where most of the sentience and suffering is. It covers the vast majority of moral patients, all of them suffering gravely in every corner of the world. The future is still incredibly grim; AI could impose even more suffering if we don’t get this right.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Animals are not one issue

EAs recognized the importance of animal suffering – factory farming, wild animal suffering – long before the rest of the world, which still has not really recognized its importance. That was the insight. And then, somehow, we just decided to group it all as one single issue. One moral cause area.

Chickens, fish, pigs, shrimp, insects… farmed and wild. Nonhuman animals are the most populous category of moral patients by orders of magnitude. Yet we have collapsed all of it into a single line item that competes for attention with everything else as if it were just one intervention among many. 

The problems are staring right at us

This could be the path we go down in the name of flourishing: we simply lower the bar on cost-effectiveness. We go looking everywhere for things to do, finding problems to solve, manufacturing causes to fund. But are those really the best use of a once-in-a-generation wave of capital and talent? 

If we still take scale and cost-effectiveness seriously, we have so, so many problems staring right at us. They just happen not to be happening to humans.

What we need is a lot more people working on:

• getting billions of chickens out of cages;
• getting tens of millions of mother pigs out of gestation crates;
• giving billions of ducks access to water;
• stopping hundreds of millions of frogs from being dismembered alive;
• preventing tens of billions of chickens from fracturing under their own weight;
• sparing hundreds of millions of rabbits whose feet are sliced raw by the wire cages;
• stopping trillions of feeder fish from being eaten alive;
• preventing hundreds of millions of mice and rats from a slow death suffocating on their own blood;
• preventing trillions of insects from being farmed in horrendous conditions (even here, I'm reducing the most numerous animal species on Earth into a single word).

Just some examples, and the list goes on and on and on. I'm listing these only to make them slightly more granular. 

There are a lot more neglected animal populations that no one is doing anything about, and we should be looking for those problems (I left my job recently to do exactly this). A lot of new effort should go toward finding new ways to help all those neglected beings.  

AI x Animals

Contrary to popular belief, many "animal people" in EA recognize just as much that the most critical work today lies in making sure AI goes well. But while it is easy to appreciate AI's grave implications, what is even more alarming is something the discourse rarely touches: AI's implications for animals might still be graver.

We could flourish while the moral atrocity that is factory farming is left intact, or even expanded by AI. Trillions of sentient lives could continue suffering completely unheeded as they stay almost entirely outside the moral circle.

Yet anything in that AI × animals intersection gets filed, yet again, under "animals." 

"AI x animals" is a sub-bucket of a sub-bucket, rather than treated as central to the long-term future we keep saying we care about. If we are serious about a future with less suffering, then what AI entrenches or prevents for animals is not a footnote to that future. It may be most of it. 

Stop looking past them

Under any reasonable moral weight model, animal consciousness and suffering far trump that of humans - today and very possibly long into the future.

Beyond making sure we don’t all die, stopping animal suffering should be our first priority. We should address this before moving on to civics, art, and flourishing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The problems are staring right at us, and we continue to look past them. And now, with all the new energy pointed at finding new problems to solve, we are about to look past them harder, with more money and more talent than ever. Let’s not.