I'm curious if more can be said about the debate topic vetos. In particular, on reviewing the Politics post again, it says that "content will not be prohibited because of its political nature."

Speaking personally, silent (i.e. where no rationale is given, though please let me know if I've missed one) vetos of topics the community decided were its preferred top choice of discussion feel potentially corrosive to EA's discussion norms as a whole and maintaining the assumption of community-wide good faith. 

I'm really looking forward to the debate on this topic! 

Some thoughts:

1. I like that debate topics aren't overly operationalized. Allowing people to take slightly different interpretations means that people can focus on the variation which seem most important to them. This can come at the expense of understanding each other crisply and when interpreting the (quantified) agreement scale.
   1. I'm not sure what were the main takeaways from previous debates, but I felt that I cared more about hearing interesting new takes and people's reactions to them than I cared about assessing the overall community opinion.
2. "By default" - One possible ambiguity here is whether this means with >50% probability or with >99.9% probability.
3. "The world where" -> "The worlds where". Also, perhaps this notion of conceiving of possible futures as possible worlds is a bit too heavy on EA/rationalist-lingo.
4. "AI goes well for humans" - I broadly like this. I would be interested in people's opinion for both neartermist and lontermist worldviews, and under maxipok or flourishing futures.
5. "Sentient beings" - Here I think the discussion should be contained to nonhuman animals because the other case seemed to be handled in the previous AI welfare debate.
6. I don't think that the statement of the debate should be about "what we should do" but rather about the worldview directly. It's a bit hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I think so and I may regret this.
   1. I think that an operationalization which is too close to people's actual decisions may cause more people to defend their existing views or to take a stance based on what's more salient. I'm not sure why exactly, but framings like "Without extra animal-focused work, even aligned superintelligence would be bad for non-human animals" feel like they would generate more ideologically-oriented responses.
   2. This makes the question more complex with more moving parts.
7. I think that the framing of "AGI which doesn't cause human extinction or disempowerment will value animal welfare" is quite good. Perhaps this should include CAIS or multipolar scenarios.

"On the margin, it is better for animals to work on the transition to AGI going well, than directly working on AI for animal welfare"

I'm worried everyone will just agree that this seems unlikely. That's a very high bar.

"AGI which doesn't cause human extinction or disempowerment will value animal welfare"

I think we don't care about whether it "values animal welfare". We care about what happens to animals. There are many very plausible worlds where these two are uncorrelated (just like in ours, where people have never valued AW that high and it has never been that bad for farmed animals, especially the smaller ones).

"Without extra animal-focused work, even aligned superintelligence would be bad for non-human animals"

That's my favorite version, but I'm worried it invites everyone to just agree on "we should have some extra animal-focused work, anyway" and not red-team each other deeply enough.

So here's a minimal version I propose: AI safety work that helps humans also helps other animals, to some extent.

(The "to some extent" is optional. I added it to invite people to think about whether AIS helps other animals at all, and not just all agree over the uncontroversial and boring claim that "AIS helps humans more than animals".)

I like this minimal formulation because 

• impossible to misinterpret.
• it makes clear that the more we lean yes on this, the more AI safety work that helps humans is overall robustly positive, all else equal (e.g., it'd be robust to uncertainty on moral weights, on the expected size of different populations in the future, or on the sign of x-risk reduction). And I think the answer to this question is a crux for some people for (not) supporting AIS work. I feel like none of the versions you propose (or the original version) quite captures this as much as I'd like.

Thanks for asking us, Toby! Looking forward to this debate week :)

I would express a strong preference for the "AGI going well" framing over something like "aligned superintelligence", as the latter presupposes a particular view of how AI is going to go that not everyone agrees with. I think the question is still worth discussing if you believe that AI progress is much more gradual or will stall out at humanish levels of intelligence. And then theres the typical question of what "aligned" means: aligned to who or what? 

"AGI goes well" is better because it doesn't presuppose as much: just that we have AGI and humans are doing fine. 

Planning to post the announcement today. Currently a little confused about whether to refer to transformative AI or artificial general intelligence. Transformative AI assumes a certain worldview, or at least assumes that AI will be transformative in some fairly radical way. If we discuss AGI, we might just be talking about a slightly more productive humanity and whether that will be good for animals, which feels like a very non-interesting question in comparison.