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.
Please do not write clickbait titles like this. Put the subject matter in the title.
Thanks for the suggestion
New title is better!
Megaprojects for animals (or an updated version perhaps, this list being from 2022) seems more pertinent than ever.
Well said. On top of this, many new interventions are going to be primarily talent constrained, whereas Animal Welfare is primarily funding constrained. Animal Welfare should be prioritized at least until funding is no longer the main constraint.
I strongly agree that the animal welfare implications of AI should be owned at least as much by the AI safety space as by the animal welfare space, not that there needs to be a hard distinction between the two but there is obviously some declarative truth to it. Animal suffering is among the greatest lock-in risks.
I'm worried that many people outside the AW space believe the end of factory farming is a foregone conclusion. At one forum in SF in February mixing leaders from AI safety and AW, many AIS folks came away at least partly convinced by the AW folks that this cannot be taken for granted. AIS needs to take seriously the inside view of AW leaders that AI will not necessarily solve FAW by default, not to mention WAW.
This lands for me, and the line I keep returning to is the one where you catch yourself reducing the most numerous animals on Earth to a single word. That instinct to collapse is the whole problem in miniature.
Think about how we treat human health by comparison. We take one species and split it into twenty urgent priorities: heart disease, cancers, maternal mortality, road accidents,criminal justice , governance... We refuse to flatten ourselves, because every facet of our suffering feels vivid and worth its own field. With animals we run the operation in reverse. We take thousands of species, or at least the dozens we treat most negligently, and fold them into one comparable unit, then ask that single unit to compete for attention against everything else. The asymmetry in how we draw the lines tracks nothing about the underlying scale of suffering. It tracks only how much we let ourselves care.
And the reason is a predictable bias, not a mystery. We value the pain of beings who look and sound like us, and our concern falls off sharply with distance: from our race, our gender, our nation, our species. It's scope insensitivity pointed at the moral circle itself. The chickens fracturing under their own weight and the feeder fish eaten alive are not suffering less than we would. People have tried to put numbers on this, and even the conservative welfare estimates imply aggregate suffering that dwarfs almost anything else we fund. The beings are just far enough from us that the figures don't move us the way they should. Their ordinary day likely holds more pain than our worst one.
This is where your AI point matters more than the discourse admits. The moral circle we draw right now is the training example a more capable intelligence learns from. If we build systems while modeling the lesson that distance and unfamiliarity justify discounting a being's pain, we are encoding the template that gets applied to us the moment we are the less powerful ones. How we treat what we can ignore today is the precedent for how we get treated when we can be ignored. That is not a footnote to the long-term future. As you say, it may be most of it.
Thank you for refusing to look past them.
Very well said, it's so sad what happens to so many animals and like you said the list goes on and on. And the funny thing is, we are animals. If AI goes well for animals, that implies it goes well for us.
But we really don't want speciesist AI. If we have AI that has a moral circle based on species membership, or based on certain capabilities like intelligence, what happens when it gets to the point where we are no longer intelligent enough to qualify, or the only species that's morally relevant is the AI species?
I really like this framing, especially the push against “problem hunting” when there’s already an overwhelming amount of neglected suffering in front of us. Animals are not “one issue” but instead, the majority of moral patients. This is underappreciated, even within EA.
One thing that resonated from Ransohoff’s piece, though, is the idea that we don’t yet have the ecosystem to absorb a huge influx of capital. I think that applies here too. Even if we take the case for prioritising animals as seriously as we can, it’s not obvious the field is currently set up to productively deploy funding at the scale you’re pointing to (multiple interventions, geographies, and organisations) without hitting bottlenecks or diminishing returns.
That seems less like a reason not to prioritise animals, and more like a reason to invest heavily in building out the space itself: more people, more organisations, better-developed intervention areas, and especially more work on neglected animal populations (which is why what we're now doing feels particularly valuable).
The AI × animals point also feels important and still quite underexplored. It does seem like it falls between existing buckets in a way that makes it easy to overlook, despite potentially being central to the long-term picture.
Overall, I agree with the core concern. There’s a real risk that a wave of new funding ends up looking for new, legible problems while continuing to underinvest in ones that are already vast, tractable, and unsolved. Making sure that doesn’t happen for animals seems like one of the key challenges for this next phase.
I largely agree, the plight of animals is being looked past ... as is the only somewhat realistic solution to factory farming (and, therefore, the implications of AI on factory farming).
All or most funding currently allocated towards animal welfare in EA ought to be focused on but one intervention, in my view: policy advocacy to help get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves ASAP. No other intervention offers comparable upside (in terms of reduced suffering) of even a modest market penetration of cultivated meat.
I don't see another way to end factory farming in our lifetimes.
Just one person's strongly held view, though I'm also pleased to see Bruce Friedrich's talk at EAG next week titled 'the only tractable solution to industrial animal farming'. See some of you there!