Case in point: this comment thread https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B6d8Wzk4gNzHsXvdi/ai-safety-is-extremely-bottlenecked-on-grantmakers?commentId=KFBL4pezAbYLcWzTE

To expand, posts like these give me https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/someone-who-is-good-at-the-economy-please-help-me vibes. 

"Someone who is good at finding grantmakers please help, life on my planet might get wiped out if we don't fund saving it" 

"Hire people who are maybe not quite as elite-of-the-elite-tier talent as you hoped, since they can still do a ton of good"

"no"

when a strong candidate turns down a CG offer, the result is often not “a slightly-less-good grantmaker," it’s just one fewer grantmaker. We routinely close rounds with fewer hires than we'd planned for.

Have you considered leaving rounds open longer and/or hiring slightly-less-good grantmakers instead of closing the round?

Very well said, it's so sad what happens to so many animals and like you said the list goes on and on. And the funny thing is, we are animals. If AI goes well for animals, that implies it goes well for us. 

But we really don't want speciesist AI. If we have AI that has a moral circle based on species membership, or based on certain capabilities like intelligence, what happens when it gets to the point where we are no longer intelligent enough to qualify, or the only species that's morally relevant is the AI species?

For what it's worth, I'm surprised that people who think abortion is murder aren't doing more illegal stuff to destroy clinics. 

Also for what it's worth, I think factory farming is so bad that it's by far the greatest injustice caused by humans in history. Justifiable wars have been fought for orders of magnitude less important things. 

If factory farming ends, animal products will be prohibitively expensive for most people, so you'll end up mostly vegan anyways. Why not start now?

What are gene drives? Is that like genetically modifying insects to not feel pain and then introducing them into the environment so the pain-free genes eventually replace all the standard genes? (Or whatever other genetic feature, not necessarily pain related)

Hmm, that opens up a lot of interesting conversation threads. I actually think some goals will be easier to align ai towards than others, for example we've aligned some ai to winning at chess and now they're better than any human. Obviously that kind of goal is much simpler than any values framework that would be worth aligning agi too, but I think sentientist values would be easier to instill than "human values" (although not in the case of LLMs, I think they're already basically "aligned" with human values and we now need to shift them towards caring more about all sentient beings). And on top of that, I think sentientist values will care enough about us and our values that a sentientist agi would "go well" for us. 

But I'm not even close to an expert, so that's all very tentative speculation.

Have you seen the moral ambition folks?

As far as I know, most current alignment work is going towards aligning ai with human values. If that's successful then yay for us, but if we worked towards aligning ai with sentientist values (along the lines of "evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings"), then we would also be in the group of valued beings. If people think that would go well for us, then I think it would make sense to think about ways to redirect more research towards aligning ai with all sentient beings, rather than just human values. 

For example, humans. We are somewhat aligned with ourselves, but not with other animals, and that's been catastrophic for animals (see factory farms, industrial fishing). If we encountered aliens that were more powerful than us, that had alignment like ours, they would not care about wiping us out (maybe a few of them would, but most wouldn't). But if those aliens were aligned with all sentient beings, they would care. Say for some reason that very powerful aliens were somehow convinced by elephants to be aligned with elephants, we would still be on the chopping block along with every other species. So it's in everyones interest to align them with all sentient beings, and in the process, we get alignment with us as well. 

I would be interested in hearing why people might think ai that went well for animals would not go well for humans, I can imagine scenarios like that but they seem extremely unlikely to me. 

I'm having a hard time putting what I mean into words, something like "alignment with all sentient beings gets alignment with humans for free whereas alignment with humans does not get alignment with other sentient beings for free" plus "alignment with all sentient beings is simpler than alignment with humans in particular". I think the question I posed in my original comment would help determine whether someone agrees with the first part of this paragraph.