Hi! I'm a final year undergraduate student at Trinity College Dublin studying Theoretical Physics. I'm primarily interested in animal advocacy as of now, though I'm open to other cause areas too.
Should EA avoid using AI art for non-research purposes?
While I understand that it may help people better understand some things through imagery while saving time and effort, I do have some ethical concerns about the scraping of artwork from artists without their consent. On top of that, at least currently, you can usually spot AI art, as oppose to human-created art, from a mile away and to me it looks a bit cheap. So unless it's really needed, I believe there should be a norm against the use of AI art
I don't really have a concrete answer for you, however I am also interested in this topic and have some resources which may be of use to you, namely this article by Social Change Lab on how philanthropists can support social movements, and this forum post, along with the other posts of the series, on how EA can incorporate an "abolitionist" frame of animal advocacy alongside the current advocacy strategies that are more canonical in the EA movement currently (more quantifiable/measurable and "welfarist"), and this post of that series provides some potential avenues for animal advocacy from a more "abolitionist" outlook which may potentially prove to be effective. On top of this there is another forum post about promoting Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning within the broader animal advocacy movement where it generally lacks relative to the more "EA-aligned" animal advocacy.
Maybe this is a bit of an aside (though still probably relevant), but I have been involved in the Plant-Based Universities campaign at my university over the past year (so I may be a little biased here) and this is one initiative which is not exactly aiming to change peoples' attitudes towards animals and veganism directly, but which aims to make change on the institutional level, yet a large part of this does still involves individual outreach among students. This campaign, although it seeks transformative (as opposed to incremental) change, is still in some sense quantifiable as you can see how many universities have transitioned (though of course the broader aim is to bring about a societal shift in attitudes, which is more difficult to quantify yet undoubtedly holds much positive value). There exists a similar initiative in the US in Allied Scholars for Animal Protection (though they also focus on many other initiatives too).
Hopefully this is of value to you, even if I kind of danced around an actual answer to your question.
(Apologies in advance for the messiness from my lack of hyperlinks/footnotes as I'm commenting from my phone and I can't find how to include them using my phone. If anyone knows how to, please let me know)
This is something which has actually briefly crossed my mind before. Looking (briefly) into the subject, I believe an alliance with the climate advocacy movement could be a plausible route of action for the AI safety movement. Though this of course would depend on whether AI would be net-positive or net-negative for the climate. I am not sure yet which it will be, but it is something I believe is certainly worth looking into.
"published studies overestimated the cost and carbon footprint of ML training because they didn’t have access to the right information or because they extrapolated point-in-time data without accounting for algorithmic or hardware improvements."
There could also be reasons to think that this may not be the best move particularly if it's association with the climate advocacy movement fuels a larger right-wing x E/Acc counter-movement, though I personally feel it would be better to (at least partly) align with the climate movement to bring the AI slowdown movement further into the mainstream.
Another potential drawback might be if the climate advocates see many in the AI safety crowd as not being as concerned about climate change as they may hope, and they may see the AI safety movement as using the climate movement simply for their own gains, especially given the tech-sceptic sentiment in much of the climate movement (though definitely not all of it). However, I believe the intersection of the AI safety movement with the climate movement would be net-positive as there would be more exposure of the many potential issues associated with the expansion of AI capabilities owing to the climate movement being a very well established lobbying force, and in a sense the tech-scepticism in the climate movement may also be helpful in slowing down progress in AI capabilities.
Also, this alliance may spread more interest in and sympathy towards AI safety within the climate movement (as well as more climate-awareness among AI safety people), as has been done with the climate and animal movements, as well as the AI safety and animal welfare movements.
Another potential risk is if the AI industry is able to become much more efficient (net-zero, net-negative, or even just slightly net-positive in GHG emissions) and/or come up with many good climate solutions (whether aligned or not), which may make climate advocates more optimistic about AI (though this may also be a reason to align with the climate movement to prevent this case from ocurring).
Hi, sorry if I'm a bit late here, and I don't want to be repeating myself too much, but since I feel it was not properly understood, one of the main points I originally made in this thread and I want to really hit home is that happiness as measured while in a state of happiness cannot be compared in any way to non-existence as "measured" in a state of non-existence, since we obviously cannot perceive sensations (or literally anything) when dead/not in existence. So the common intuition that happiness is preferable to non-existence is based upon our shallow understanding of what it is to "be" dead/non-existant, but from a rational point of view this idea simply does not hold. If I was being tortured with no way out, I would certainly want to die as quickly as I could, however when I imagine death in that moment, I am imagining (while in the state of suffering, and not in the "state" of death) a cessation of that suffering. However, to experience such a cessation I must be able to experience something to which I can compare against said experience of suffering. So technically speaking it doesn't make any sense at all to say that happiness/suffering is better than non-existence as measured in the respective states of happiness/suffering and death/non-existence. It's
And it's not like death/non-existence is neutral in this case. If you picture a scale, with positive experiences (e.g. happiness/satisfaction) in the positive direction and negative experiences (e.g. pain/suffering) in the negative direction, death does NOT appear at 0 since what we are measuring is the perceived value of the experiences. Put another way in terms of utility functions, if someone has a utility function at some value, and then they die, rather than immediately going to zero, their utility function immediately ceases to exist, as a utility function must belong to someone.
Also this idea of mine is somewhat new to me (a few months old maybe), so I haven't thought through many implications and edge-cases too thoroughly (yet). However this idea, however difficult for me to wrestle with, is something which I find myself simply unable to reason out of.
FWIW, I think one should put ~0 weight on a view which is indifferent between doing nothing and eliminating all sentient beings forever, as I consider the latter way way worse.
In which way is it worse? Again, you cannot compare a state of existence where one can experience an perceive things against a "state" of nonexistence in a way which leads to a preference of one over the other. As in, you cannot compare positive/negative experiences to no experience whatsoever, because then what is the common factor which you are comparing in order to prefer one over the other? And anyways, you would need to compare being dead from the perspective of the dead "person" against being alive from the perspective of the alive person. "They" cannot experience anything (as "they" don't exist) and thus they cannot have a preference for life. So this is, as I stated in my reply to your first comment, an example of mistakenly looking at death by imposing our c, the former of which is an actual experience and the latter of which doesn't exist.
I encourage you to imagine there is an actual person in the real world who for some (impossible) reason had the power to kill all life. I would worry about what that person would do. Would you not, just because there is a sense in which killing all life would not be good/bad for anyone?
I would too, but only due to the vast amount of suffering they could potentially bring upon the world.
survival is instrumentally valuable to have positive conscious experiences
But what is it that makes positive experiences preferable to no experience at all? Sure, they are preferable to less positive experiences, because you can experience (or can understand the experience of) that worse event as well as the better one, and thus you can make a preference between them. This is not the case for death, since death must be understood as fundamentally different from anything else in life (we can only understand death as a (fuzzy) abstract concept, and never intrinsically).
For example, if someone kills me, I can no longer spend time with my family and friends.
Yes, but again you are imposing your experience of perceiving someone else's death and how that affects you (or how you believe it would affect you if you did experience losing someone close) onto you experiencing ("experiencing") your own death, which are fundamentally different since one is an actual experience, and the other is simply nothing. And as a consequence, "you" also don't have anything like a memory when "you" are dead.
Hi Dermot, I'm Oisín. Are you aware of Ireland's EA chapter, EA Éire? I'm part of it myself, so if you'd like and if you are not already part of it, I can get you added to the EA Éire WhatsApp groupchat. Also we have some meetups in Dublin (some in Cork too I think for those down south) so you'd be welcome to join us. One of the organisers has actually written a syllabus for and run a proto-biosecurity fellowship in the past, so you could probably talk to him about that a bit more about pandemic prevention stuff I'd say. Anyways, welcome to the EA community!
I feel like the act of consciously pushing the button to cause said consequences to occur vs the consequences of pushing button A or B occurring spontaneously and without anyone actually pushing either button are slightly different cases. I'm not 100% sure if Epicurus would push button B or be indifferent as in his words:
But the wise man neither seeks to escape life nor fears the cessation of life, for neither does life offend him nor does the absence of life seem to be any evil.[1]
However, I still believe that one should be indifferent to which outcome occurs, in order to remain consistent with this view. I do feel as though this view would probably lean towards being indifferent to which button one choses to push.
Having said this, I too would push button B, but this is due to my deep-rooted biases about my life and death, however irrational they may be, but maybe I would be better off changing this stance, since according to Epicurus:
And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. So that the man speaks but idly who says that he fears death not because it will be painful when it comes, but because it is painful in anticipation.[2]
Also I just want to add that, on your point that annihilation would be bad because it prevents future flourishing, for whom would this be bad? It can't be bad for counterfactual non-existent beings, since they don't exist to perceive the badness of missing out on (the good bits of) life. Or am I misunderstanding your claim? And what exactly do you mean by instrumental reasons in this case? Could you give some examples?
Yes, this view would probably imply that if pressing this button would wipe out all life instantaneously and without anyone anticipating it, it would not be bad, nor good, nor neutral. I mean, who would it be good/bad/neutral for exactly, when there is nobody to judge or perceive it. It makes no sense to say that death is something which "happens" to you, because there is no "you" when "you" "are" dead, just a memory of you held by others. How can you prefer something over death (or death over something) when death is not something one can experience in any way? In order to prefer one thing over another, both of these things need to have some common property which you favour more/less of in one than the other. I would guess that for most people this common property would be some form of pleasure (be it short- or long-term). But you are comparing the magnitude of your perception of this pleasure when you are in some given state (of being) against when you are dead. But you ("you") cannot perceive anything when dead, and to even see death as a state (in which you are) is mistaken (at least according to Epicurus, i.e. no afterlife etc.).
No sentient being can experience death, so in order to understand death we look at what it is not (which is everything), and it seems that we are quite selective about what it is not, and so (I'm speculating here) when we say that we prefer to continue living instead of dying, we usually mean that we prefer having or being able to have (perceive) some amount of pleasure over not being able to have it. However, we do not perceive the loss of missing out on these experiences since "we" cannot experience anything. We can only know about death from looking at others who die, and since we miss being with them, we think of death as not preferable to life (unless it is e.g. a life of lots of suffering, in which case we usually see death as better, but this too suffers from the same error). But to the person themselves, death cannot be perceived, and thus judged or valued over/below anything.
So sure, this way of looking at death can possibly have some unintuitive-seeming implications. However, the common idea of death is quite shallow and short-sighted as we are (at least implicitly) trying to look at our death by imposing the experiences of another (alive) person who perceives our death (and the associated good/bad/indifferent sensations) onto how we would experience our own death, which is fundamentally mistaken.
So, if all life got instantaneously wiped out, then this can be neither good nor bad (nor neutral, given that a neutral experience is understood as one which one does not see as good nor bad, but is an experience nonetheless, if a neutral experience understood as such is even possible for one to obtain).
One immediate consequence of taking this view which comes to my mind would be maybe something like in-ovo sexing (and I am saying this as a vegan of 3 years, and a committed one at that) since baby chicks may not have much self-awareness and if their deaths are near-instantaneous, then this may not have that much direct positive impact (if any at all) in welfare, aside from maybe some secondary (social) impacts like greater awareness of their intrinsic value, which alone may make this type of intervention net-positive, but probably not nearly as cost-effective as other interventions. And the case of in-ovo sexing is just one example of how looking at death realistically (in my opinion) can have drastic changes to how EA looks at impact. This (along with its neglectedness) is why I believe it could be of huge importance for someone more intellectually equipped than myself to do a more detailed dive into how this view (or similar variants of it) would affect EA.
I'd love to hear if you or anyone else have any thoughts/criticisms about what I've said here :)
I'd like to see research on methods we could use to effectively and efficiently collect data at large scales with minimal costs.
I'm not sure how much of a bottleneck (high-quality) data collection is in different cause-areas, but since it is super important to so many cause-areas, I think it would be well worth looking into. I imagine that surely there has to be at least some low-hanging fruit in terms of ways we can obtain lots of data for various cause-areas, buy I'd love some proper investigation into these ways.
40%➔ 20% agreeWhile I understand that it may help people better understand some things through imagery while saving time and effort, I do have some ethical concerns about the scraping of artwork from artists without their consent. On top of that, at least currently, you can usually spot AI art, as oppose to human-created art, from a mile away and to me it looks a bit cheap. So unless it's really needed, I believe there should be a norm against the use of AI art
No problem at all :)
I don't really have a concrete answer for you, however I am also interested in this topic and have some resources which may be of use to you, namely this article by Social Change Lab on how philanthropists can support social movements, and this forum post, along with the other posts of the series, on how EA can incorporate an "abolitionist" frame of animal advocacy alongside the current advocacy strategies that are more canonical in the EA movement currently (more quantifiable/measurable and "welfarist"), and this post of that series provides some potential avenues for animal advocacy from a more "abolitionist" outlook which may potentially prove to be effective. On top of this there is another forum post about promoting Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning within the broader animal advocacy movement where it generally lacks relative to the more "EA-aligned" animal advocacy.
Maybe this is a bit of an aside (though still probably relevant), but I have been involved in the Plant-Based Universities campaign at my university over the past year (so I may be a little biased here) and this is one initiative which is not exactly aiming to change peoples' attitudes towards animals and veganism directly, but which aims to make change on the institutional level, yet a large part of this does still involves individual outreach among students. This campaign, although it seeks transformative (as opposed to incremental) change, is still in some sense quantifiable as you can see how many universities have transitioned (though of course the broader aim is to bring about a societal shift in attitudes, which is more difficult to quantify yet undoubtedly holds much positive value). There exists a similar initiative in the US in Allied Scholars for Animal Protection (though they also focus on many other initiatives too).
Hopefully this is of value to you, even if I kind of danced around an actual answer to your question.
(Apologies in advance for the messiness from my lack of hyperlinks/footnotes as I'm commenting from my phone and I can't find how to include them using my phone. If anyone knows how to, please let me know)
This is something which has actually briefly crossed my mind before. Looking (briefly) into the subject, I believe an alliance with the climate advocacy movement could be a plausible route of action for the AI safety movement. Though this of course would depend on whether AI would be net-positive or net-negative for the climate. I am not sure yet which it will be, but it is something I believe is certainly worth looking into.
This topic has actually gained some recent media attention (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/03/tech/google-ai-greenhouse-gas-emissions-environmental-impact/index.html), although most of the media focus on the intersection of AI and climate change appears to be around how AI can be used as a benefit to the climate.
A few recent academic articles (1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032123008778#b111, 2. https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1Wt2_f1RB7ylf7ufD8LviiD6lKkQpQnWZ&export=download, 3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-021-01294-x, 4. https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/widm.1507) go in depth on the topic of how beneficial/harmful AI will be the climate, and basically the conclusions appear somewhat mixed (I admittedly didn't look into them in too much detail), with there being a lot of emissions from ML training and servers, though this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05149) has shown that
There could also be reasons to think that this may not be the best move particularly if it's association with the climate advocacy movement fuels a larger right-wing x E/Acc counter-movement, though I personally feel it would be better to (at least partly) align with the climate movement to bring the AI slowdown movement further into the mainstream.
Another potential drawback might be if the climate advocates see many in the AI safety crowd as not being as concerned about climate change as they may hope, and they may see the AI safety movement as using the climate movement simply for their own gains, especially given the tech-sceptic sentiment in much of the climate movement (though definitely not all of it). However, I believe the intersection of the AI safety movement with the climate movement would be net-positive as there would be more exposure of the many potential issues associated with the expansion of AI capabilities owing to the climate movement being a very well established lobbying force, and in a sense the tech-scepticism in the climate movement may also be helpful in slowing down progress in AI capabilities.
Also, this alliance may spread more interest in and sympathy towards AI safety within the climate movement (as well as more climate-awareness among AI safety people), as has been done with the climate and animal movements, as well as the AI safety and animal welfare movements.
Another potential risk is if the AI industry is able to become much more efficient (net-zero, net-negative, or even just slightly net-positive in GHG emissions) and/or come up with many good climate solutions (whether aligned or not), which may make climate advocates more optimistic about AI (though this may also be a reason to align with the climate movement to prevent this case from ocurring).
Hi, sorry if I'm a bit late here, and I don't want to be repeating myself too much, but since I feel it was not properly understood, one of the main points I originally made in this thread and I want to really hit home is that happiness as measured while in a state of happiness cannot be compared in any way to non-existence as "measured" in a state of non-existence, since we obviously cannot perceive sensations (or literally anything) when dead/not in existence. So the common intuition that happiness is preferable to non-existence is based upon our shallow understanding of what it is to "be" dead/non-existant, but from a rational point of view this idea simply does not hold. If I was being tortured with no way out, I would certainly want to die as quickly as I could, however when I imagine death in that moment, I am imagining (while in the state of suffering, and not in the "state" of death) a cessation of that suffering. However, to experience such a cessation I must be able to experience something to which I can compare against said experience of suffering. So technically speaking it doesn't make any sense at all to say that happiness/suffering is better than non-existence as measured in the respective states of happiness/suffering and death/non-existence. It's
And it's not like death/non-existence is neutral in this case. If you picture a scale, with positive experiences (e.g. happiness/satisfaction) in the positive direction and negative experiences (e.g. pain/suffering) in the negative direction, death does NOT appear at 0 since what we are measuring is the perceived value of the experiences. Put another way in terms of utility functions, if someone has a utility function at some value, and then they die, rather than immediately going to zero, their utility function immediately ceases to exist, as a utility function must belong to someone.
Also this idea of mine is somewhat new to me (a few months old maybe), so I haven't thought through many implications and edge-cases too thoroughly (yet). However this idea, however difficult for me to wrestle with, is something which I find myself simply unable to reason out of.
In which way is it worse? Again, you cannot compare a state of existence where one can experience an perceive things against a "state" of nonexistence in a way which leads to a preference of one over the other. As in, you cannot compare positive/negative experiences to no experience whatsoever, because then what is the common factor which you are comparing in order to prefer one over the other? And anyways, you would need to compare being dead from the perspective of the dead "person" against being alive from the perspective of the alive person. "They" cannot experience anything (as "they" don't exist) and thus they cannot have a preference for life. So this is, as I stated in my reply to your first comment, an example of mistakenly looking at death by imposing our c, the former of which is an actual experience and the latter of which doesn't exist.
I would too, but only due to the vast amount of suffering they could potentially bring upon the world.
But what is it that makes positive experiences preferable to no experience at all? Sure, they are preferable to less positive experiences, because you can experience (or can understand the experience of) that worse event as well as the better one, and thus you can make a preference between them. This is not the case for death, since death must be understood as fundamentally different from anything else in life (we can only understand death as a (fuzzy) abstract concept, and never intrinsically).
Yes, but again you are imposing your experience of perceiving someone else's death and how that affects you (or how you believe it would affect you if you did experience losing someone close) onto you experiencing ("experiencing") your own death, which are fundamentally different since one is an actual experience, and the other is simply nothing. And as a consequence, "you" also don't have anything like a memory when "you" are dead.
Hi Dermot, I'm Oisín. Are you aware of Ireland's EA chapter, EA Éire? I'm part of it myself, so if you'd like and if you are not already part of it, I can get you added to the EA Éire WhatsApp groupchat. Also we have some meetups in Dublin (some in Cork too I think for those down south) so you'd be welcome to join us. One of the organisers has actually written a syllabus for and run a proto-biosecurity fellowship in the past, so you could probably talk to him about that a bit more about pandemic prevention stuff I'd say. Anyways, welcome to the EA community!
I feel like the act of consciously pushing the button to cause said consequences to occur vs the consequences of pushing button A or B occurring spontaneously and without anyone actually pushing either button are slightly different cases. I'm not 100% sure if Epicurus would push button B or be indifferent as in his words:
However, I still believe that one should be indifferent to which outcome occurs, in order to remain consistent with this view. I do feel as though this view would probably lean towards being indifferent to which button one choses to push.
Having said this, I too would push button B, but this is due to my deep-rooted biases about my life and death, however irrational they may be, but maybe I would be better off changing this stance, since according to Epicurus:
Also I just want to add that, on your point that annihilation would be bad because it prevents future flourishing, for whom would this be bad? It can't be bad for counterfactual non-existent beings, since they don't exist to perceive the badness of missing out on (the good bits of) life. Or am I misunderstanding your claim? And what exactly do you mean by instrumental reasons in this case? Could you give some examples?
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus [4], translated by Cyril Bailey (1926)
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus [3], translated by Cyril Bailey (1926)
Hi Vasco, thank you for your question!
Yes, this view would probably imply that if pressing this button would wipe out all life instantaneously and without anyone anticipating it, it would not be bad, nor good, nor neutral. I mean, who would it be good/bad/neutral for exactly, when there is nobody to judge or perceive it. It makes no sense to say that death is something which "happens" to you, because there is no "you" when "you" "are" dead, just a memory of you held by others. How can you prefer something over death (or death over something) when death is not something one can experience in any way? In order to prefer one thing over another, both of these things need to have some common property which you favour more/less of in one than the other. I would guess that for most people this common property would be some form of pleasure (be it short- or long-term). But you are comparing the magnitude of your perception of this pleasure when you are in some given state (of being) against when you are dead. But you ("you") cannot perceive anything when dead, and to even see death as a state (in which you are) is mistaken (at least according to Epicurus, i.e. no afterlife etc.).
No sentient being can experience death, so in order to understand death we look at what it is not (which is everything), and it seems that we are quite selective about what it is not, and so (I'm speculating here) when we say that we prefer to continue living instead of dying, we usually mean that we prefer having or being able to have (perceive) some amount of pleasure over not being able to have it. However, we do not perceive the loss of missing out on these experiences since "we" cannot experience anything. We can only know about death from looking at others who die, and since we miss being with them, we think of death as not preferable to life (unless it is e.g. a life of lots of suffering, in which case we usually see death as better, but this too suffers from the same error). But to the person themselves, death cannot be perceived, and thus judged or valued over/below anything.
So sure, this way of looking at death can possibly have some unintuitive-seeming implications. However, the common idea of death is quite shallow and short-sighted as we are (at least implicitly) trying to look at our death by imposing the experiences of another (alive) person who perceives our death (and the associated good/bad/indifferent sensations) onto how we would experience our own death, which is fundamentally mistaken.
So, if all life got instantaneously wiped out, then this can be neither good nor bad (nor neutral, given that a neutral experience is understood as one which one does not see as good nor bad, but is an experience nonetheless, if a neutral experience understood as such is even possible for one to obtain).
One immediate consequence of taking this view which comes to my mind would be maybe something like in-ovo sexing (and I am saying this as a vegan of 3 years, and a committed one at that) since baby chicks may not have much self-awareness and if their deaths are near-instantaneous, then this may not have that much direct positive impact (if any at all) in welfare, aside from maybe some secondary (social) impacts like greater awareness of their intrinsic value, which alone may make this type of intervention net-positive, but probably not nearly as cost-effective as other interventions. And the case of in-ovo sexing is just one example of how looking at death realistically (in my opinion) can have drastic changes to how EA looks at impact. This (along with its neglectedness) is why I believe it could be of huge importance for someone more intellectually equipped than myself to do a more detailed dive into how this view (or similar variants of it) would affect EA.
I'd love to hear if you or anyone else have any thoughts/criticisms about what I've said here :)
I'd like to see research on methods we could use to effectively and efficiently collect data at large scales with minimal costs.
I'm not sure how much of a bottleneck (high-quality) data collection is in different cause-areas, but since it is super important to so many cause-areas, I think it would be well worth looking into. I imagine that surely there has to be at least some low-hanging fruit in terms of ways we can obtain lots of data for various cause-areas, buy I'd love some proper investigation into these ways.