I think folks should be free to choose what level of AI use they're comfortable with, without fear of being shamed or outed inherently for using AI. Those who don't approve are free to downvote or 'x' to show their discontent. If enough people feel the same way then the incentives will do their job. 

As I said on LinkedIn, you are still engaging with a human... a human that's using AI. 

I see AI as an interesting leveller of the playing field. It gives people less room to dismiss a point of view for being conveyed haphazardly in writing. 

Writing well is a skill, built on the existential privilege of intelligence. If you don't have it, does it mean you have less right to be heard? 

Hi Jenny, very interesting, thank you. What was the response of CG to your report, and do you know if they are planning to invest more resources towards this potential cause area? 

I was wondering if anyone was going to mention that. There was a lot of media buzz about whether the events of the show could really happen at the time of its airing. This piece by Yale is supposed to sound reassuring, but it just... doesn't. :/ 

Ok, you’ve convinced me on the theoretical button-pushing. In reality those aren’t the options we’re presented with. 

Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.

I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.

And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.

I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now. 

I think that should depend on what the bets are. 

Because a large proportion of vegans revert to eating animals at some point in their lives. Moreover, it isn't going to happen in any timeframe, unfortunately. 

Re: your poll, I'd say neither. Veganism and offsetting are both 'rearranging furniture on the Titanic'. The button I'd press wouldn't be to make everyone vegan in an instant, but to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point, in an instant. 

Nothing else (bar x-risks for humans) is going to end factory farming. As you say, meat consumption is skyrocketing, yet in animal advocacy we act like there isn't a viable alternative that is, or rather could be, on the table. 

So strong is my view on this that I'd go as far as to say that the way funding is allocated in animal advocacy is extremely ineffective. It should basically all be going towards scale-up grants or policy advocacy or whatever cultivated meat businesses need. 

But yeah the findings of the Pulse survey you mentioned don't surprise me. In the end I think this campaign was a load of hot air, probably not particularly helpful nor damaging either way. 

 

Note: This comment was copy-pasted from my recent LinkedIn post for speed. Toby kindly flagged that it read a bit out of context, so just to clarify for other readers: this is not AI slop. It's human-authored LinkedIn slop 🙂

TLDR: I’d love to see more debates.