AGI x Animal Welfare: A High-EV Outreach Opportunity?

Strongly agree that if lock-in happens, it will be very important for those controlling the AIs to care about all sentient beings. My impression of top AGI researchers is that most take AI sentience pretty seriously as a possibility, and it seems hard for someone to think this without also believing animals can be sentient.

Obviously this is less true the further you get from AI safety/OpenAI/DeepMind/Anthropic. An important question is, if AGI happens and the control problem is solved, who ends up deciding what the AGI values?

I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea of random computer scientists, tech moguls, or politicians having all the power. Seems like the ideal to aim for is a democratic process structured to represent the reflective interests of all sentient beings. But this would be extremely difficult to do in practice. Realistically I expect a messy power struggle between various interest groups. In that case, outreach to leaders of all the interest groups to protect nonhuman minds is crucial, as you suggest.

I wrote some related thoughts here, curious what you think.

This is indeed a good idea (although it isn't that clear to me "how to do targeted outreach to people there" woud work, but I havent done targeted outreach before)

A future where the current situation would continue, but with AI making us more powerful, would in all likelihood be a very bad one if we are to include farmed animals (it gets more complicated if you include wild animals).

See the following relevant articles:

 Optimistic longtermism would be terrible for animals: 

Longtermism plans to colonize space and expand as much as possible would be horrifying for animals. We could bring factory farms, animal testing and see earth animals to other planets

If we don't end factory farming soon it might be there forever :  

Values and habits can lock-in for a long time - especially habits like meat eating.

For me, it sounds likely that the "expected value" of the future depends mostly on what happens to farmed and wild animals. See the Moral Weight project : "Given hedonism and conditional on sentience, we think (credence: 0.65) that the welfare ranges of humans and the vertebrate animals of interest are within an order of magnitude of one another". 

Why the expected numbers of farmed animals in the far future might be huge: 

The case could be made that the case for concerning about farmed animals in the far future is at least as strong as the case concerning for humans in the far future.

Longtermists tend to be super optimistic that alternative proteins and cultured meat will be more efficient and cheaper, baffling people working in animal welfare. 

[reasons include that factory farming goes beyond "cows+chicken+pigs" and could come to include fish and insects. It also includes silk, fashion, pigments, medical supplies, experimentation. Current AI is already boosting factory farming.]

Thanks for writing this! I have been meaning to write something about why I think digital sentience should potentially be prioritized more highly in EA; in lieu of that post, here's a quick pitch:
 

1. One of EA's comparative advantages seems to have been "taking ideas seriously." Many of the core ideas from EA came from other fields (economics, philosophy, etc.); the unusual aspect of EA is that we didn't take invertebrate welfare or Famine, Affluence, and Morality as intellectual thought experiments but instead serious issues.
2. It seems possible to me that digital welfare work will, by default, exist as an intellectual curiosity. My sample of AI engineers is skewed, but my sense is most of them will be happy to discuss digital sentience for a couple hours, but are unlikely to focus on it heavily.
3. Going from "that does seem like a potentially big problem, someone should look into that" to "I'm going to look into that" is a thing that EA's are sometimes good at doing.

I'm not too confident that AGI's would be prone to value lock in. Possibly I am optimistic about ai, but ai already seems quite good at working through ethical dilemmas and acknowledging that there is nuance and conflicting views on morals. It would seem like quite the blunder to simply regard the morals of those closest to them as the ones of most importance.

this idea sounds good and your website looks great (best of luck with your projects! :)

Thanks for sharing, Simeon!

I guess part of the lack of concern for artificial sentience is explained by people at top labs focussing on aligning AGI with human values, rather than impartial value (relatedly). Ensuring that AI systems are happy seems like a good strategy to increase impartial value. It would lead to good outcomes even in scenarios where humans become disempowered. Actually, the higher the chance of humans becoming disempowered, the more pressing is artificial sentience? I suppose it would make sense for death with dignity strategies to address this (some discussion).

Peter Singer and Tse Yip Fai were doing some work on animal welfare relating to AI last year: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-022-00187-z It looks like Fai at least is still working in this area. But I'm not sure whether they have considered or initiated outreach to AGI labs, that seems like a great idea.