Do you think that artificial sentience is possible? Is it likely and/or inevitable in the next, say, 10 years of AI development?

What keeps you going when you are at your lowest?

What are your thoughts about the position of existential risk—and more specifically AI x-risk, as a key concern of Effective Altruism?

I have a sense that while it is a significant and important concern, I'm not sure it falls into the category of "altruism" as opposed to "self-preservation", and considering its current popularity, is there a risk of this concern crowding-out other core altruistic causes around the immediate well-being of those less fortunate or less empowered?

What strategies do you think are most effective for animal liberation? Which charities do you donate to and why! Thanks for all your work.

What’s the best (ie. influenced you the most) criticism or development of your ‘key ideas’?

Specific papers/references/links would be ideal!

(By ‘key ideas’ I’m thinking things like speciesism, your concept of persons or drowning child argument, but answer based on whatever you would yourself put in this category)

You are both an academic philosopher and a public advocate for several causes. How do you balance the requirements of these two roles? Academic philosophy requires one to follow the arguments to their conclusions, no matter how controversial they are. This must affect advocacy work to some extent. What are the rules of thumb you follow?

How do you generally respond to evolutionary debunking arguments and the epistemological problem for moral realism (how we acquire facts about the moral truth), especially considering that, unlike mathematics, there are no empirical feedback loops to work off of (i.e. you can't go out and check if the facts fit with the external world)? It seems to me like we wouldn't think our mathematical intuitions if 1) we didn't have the empirical feedback loops or 2) the world told us that math didn't work sometimes. 

In your previous writing on Animal Liberation, you state:

"With the benefit of hindsight, I regret that I did allow the concept of a right to intrude into my work so unnecessarily at this point; it would have avoided misunderstanding if I had not made this concession to popular moral rhetoric."

What do you currently think about using rights and justice jargon when advocating for animals? John Stuart Mill is currently regarded as an early proponent of several movements for rights without much controversy. He often made use of the terms "right" and "liberty" in his writings. On the other hand the word "right" is very loaded in animal advocacy world, with some insisting on a very specific, strictly deontological interpretation of the word. Should people who care about animal welfare dispense with the term "rights" or should they push for a more generic understanding of the term(e.g. fundamental interests that should be protected by the state) and keep using it? 

Do you currently think non-human animals are replaceable in a way humans aren't? Can a hedonist argue for that claim consistently?

Do you know about your cameo in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong? What probability would you have placed on you shifting career paths from academia to more like your Unsong character if, in the 1970s, your younger self and everyone you knew witnessed the sky shattering?

John S Wentworth wrote a 1 minute post considering whether individual innovators cause major discoveries to happen many decades or even centuries earlier than they would have without that one person, or whether they only accelerate the discovery by a few months or years before someone else would have made the advancement. Based on your impact on the philosophy scene in the 1970s and EA's emergence decades later (the counterculture movement is considered by many to have died down during the mid-1970s which notably is around the time when some of your most famous works came out), what does your life indicate about Wentworth's models of innovation, particularly conceptual and philosophical innovation?

What do you think about the current state of introductory philosophy education, with the ancient texts (Greek, kant, etc) being Schelling points that work great in low-trust environments, but still follow the literary traditions of the times? Do you think undergrads and intellectuals outside contemporary philosophy culture (e.g. engineers, historians, anthropologists, etc) would prefer introductory philosophy classes be restructured to produce a more logical foundations to produce innovators and reductionists like your 1970s self and less literary-analysis-minded thinking?

I’ve heard of some investors allocating a small percentage of their portfolio towards highly speculative “moonshot” style investments. The logic being that it’s impossible to ever accurately forecast how some types of investment, such as start-up companies, will perform in the longer term, but that they carry the potential to offer outsized returns.

What are your thoughts on treating charitable donations similarly? For example, giving ~95% of your donations to charities for which there is a strong evidence base to back up their efficacy and giving the remaining ~5% to “speculative” style charities for which there is less objective evidence?

If you had to choose a “speculative” charitable cause, what would it be?

What are the parts of EA that you are most proud of? What are the parts that you have more criticism towards? 

Thanks for everything you do! We wouldn't be here without you.
 

What do you think is the most neglected, potentially high-impact career opportunity that could make significant progress for farmed animals.

Hi, thanks so much for being here! Could you please talk me through the rationale for assigning moral value to non-human animals?

Hi Peter, 

In Famine, Affluence, and Morality, you put forth a position that it should not matter if we help the child who is a neighbor or the child ten thousand miles away.  Is this a strongly held conclusion or a position you want people to continue to debate?

You mentioned you were fortunate enough that Princeton allows you to teach one semester a year and so you have 8 months to spend with your grandkids.  One could argue there are many more children in Trenton, NJ that would benefit from your mentorship.  This is where I disagree with consequentialism.  I believe we should care a lot about the people close to us and collectively we can make sure everyone is cared for.

Thanks for your hard work!

When you wrote The Life You Can Save, how did you determine your recommendations for the percent of income to donate to charity? I have personally found it very difficult to determine how much I should give up for others, but believe almost all above the poverty line in the west can give tremendously more than you recommend. For someone seeking to maximize their impact, but also optimize their own enjoyment of life, what advice could you give for how to strike a balance with giving. Should the line be drawn where one would be giving up something they hope the world can afford to all people? What is meaningful enough non-necessary use of $1 if its opportunity cost is a bit more than 4 days of someone else's life? This question gives me trouble when I buy anything not strictly necessary.

You have individually had a greater impact on my personal ethics and the way I live my life than anyone else. Thank you.

Bonus question if you have time: Is there any research that could answer the question as to whether the cost to save a life grows at greater than 5.5% per year after adjusting for inflation? I ask because the math suggests investing beats immediate donation if the cost to save a life does not grow at a greater rate than 5.5% per year on average.

What do you believe is the most important or valuable insight that your work on animal rights has brought to the world?

What is your biggest regret?

After the public issues around earn to give, some of us have come to the conclusion that the core failure was a missing account for the path dependent nature of the self, and of our iterative normalization of our environment.

This implies a more continuous space of how to position ourselves to best contribute over our lives, balancing both manifesting the means to contribute and protecting the will to do so. It seems at least impractical to discard all participation in the economy, so the problem seems to be unavoidable.

Given the scarcity and competitiveness of EA funding, some recommend getting experience outside of EA first and then coming back to work on issues. Others say altruism sharpens altruism and accepting non-altruistic environments is corrupting. They both make good points, and seem to really reflect a continuum of balancing alignment with social good and capital.

As someone who has navigated this problem gracefully, do you have any advice for those trying to be thoughtful in navigating this balance for themselves?

Motivations behind question: Novel. I'm curious to hear what Peter Singer thinks about arguments that explain away free will due to prior causality, and how this is reconciled with the Drowning Child argument. I still want to do good, and believe the argument cannot be falsified, but I'm curious to hear his thinking. For me, I believe doing good is right for a number of reasons, and whether or not free will exists, it doesn't matter to me (choice or not), because I will donate, and share EA, and buy into the argument.

Whether I had any choice in the matter... well who knows?

I would love to hear what Peter thinks about the free will debate and the ideas posed by Robert Sapolsky in Determined.

Epistemic Status of Paraphrase below:  Read Sam Harris' Free Will essay, and listened to a number of podcasts on free will, as well as this one mentioned partially. 

For those who don't know, Sapolsky is claiming a hard deterministic stance, and explains why downward causation still does not account for the idea of free will, because for this common idea to exist, the constituents would need to somehow become different. For example, wetness is an emergent property of water because wetness only exists with many water molecules involved... but this doesn't mean that somehow the water molecules become O2H instead of H2O when they become wet. 
But this is what is being claimed in free will debates. Our consciousness doesn't magically exhibit structural changes bearing free will. The feeling of free will arises but not some structural change. 

Anyway, that's my paraphrase of what I heard in the conversation between Sam Harris and Sapolsky recently. Figured it was worth a shot posting this question, but I understand it is somewhat irrelevant and respect if it is passed over. 

Cheers,
and I do truly hope this finds you well