Five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. Grammar Girl provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing and feed your love of the English language. Whether English is your first language or your second language, these grammar, punctuation, style, and business tips will make you a better and more successful writer. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
…
continue reading
Content provided by The Nonlinear Fund. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The Nonlinear Fund or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Player FM - Podcast App
Go offline with the Player FM app!
Go offline with the Player FM app!
EA - Animal advocates should campaign to restrict AI precision livestock farming by Zachary Brown
MP3•Episode home
Manage episode 424220473 series 3314709
Content provided by The Nonlinear Fund. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The Nonlinear Fund or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Animal advocates should campaign to restrict AI precision livestock farming, published by Zachary Brown on June 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Here's a fairly safe prediction: most of the potential harm from AI is potential harm to nonhuman animals. It's a safe[1] prediction because there are so many more nonhuman animals than there are humans. Many of these animals presently live in conditions where their lives are influenced or controlled by human activity. Since AI will increasingly substitute for human activity, many animals' lives might therefore someday be controlled or influenced by AI. Indeed, while there are just over 8 billion people, there are around a zillion[2] animals farmed each year, the majority on factory farms, where their lives are nearly entirely determined by human choices. Factory farms, then, are an enormous and terrifying arena for AI-caused harm. Accordingly, when we talk about AI governance and risks from AI, risks to nonhuman animals should be a major part of that conversation, alongside e.g. biorisks and discrimination. Unfortunately, this is basically never the case. For instance, the mostly commendable recent International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI: Interim Report, a long and comprehensive document, with a long and comprehensive name, written by committee and designed to achieve global consensus on AI risks, does not even mention animal welfare risks - does not even mention animals, or agriculture, or anything like that - at all. This blog post is a small attempt to rectify the imbalance. I want to share my thoughts about a specific AI technology: precision livestock farming. I'll argue that, while I am uncertain about whether AI precision farming technology will be good or bad for animal welfare on a per-animal basis, I think we can be much more confident that it will be bad on a total population basis, since it will likely increase the total number of farmed animals. Largely in view of this argument, but also for political feasibility reasons, I think we should consider advocating for restrictions on precision livestock farming in industrial settings. 'AI' can mean a lot of different things When we talk about the effects of AI on animal welfare, it is essential to distinguish different types of AI systems. 'How will AI affect animals?' is uselessly broad. There are a number of different AI technologies we should distinguish between: precision livestock farming, AI genetics and breeding programs, language models used by the general public, AI adoption by activists, AI adoption by alternative protein producers, models used to decode animal thoughts, and others. All quite different, and it's hard to know what the aggregate effect of these technologies will be. A lot of these technologies are important, but my focus here is on precision livestock farming. What is precision livestock farming? Precision livestock farming (PLF), as I understand it, basically means putting in place a bunch of sensors and instruments that gather data about individual farmed animals, and then having some algorithm - this could be a neural network, but might be something much more basic - manage features of the animals' environment, based on the gathered data, in order to 'optimise' farming. The classic example is an automated feeding system, which gathers data about individual animals' feeding behaviour and health and stuff and automatically distributes food in response to the gathered data. In theory, systems like this can be designed to make sure all animals are having a great time. In practice, systems like this will often be designed, I expect, to further intensify animal agriculture. What do we know about the particular technologies that are currently being implemented? According to this paper (Schillings et al, 2021), the f...
…
continue reading
2433 episodes
MP3•Episode home
Manage episode 424220473 series 3314709
Content provided by The Nonlinear Fund. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The Nonlinear Fund or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Animal advocates should campaign to restrict AI precision livestock farming, published by Zachary Brown on June 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Here's a fairly safe prediction: most of the potential harm from AI is potential harm to nonhuman animals. It's a safe[1] prediction because there are so many more nonhuman animals than there are humans. Many of these animals presently live in conditions where their lives are influenced or controlled by human activity. Since AI will increasingly substitute for human activity, many animals' lives might therefore someday be controlled or influenced by AI. Indeed, while there are just over 8 billion people, there are around a zillion[2] animals farmed each year, the majority on factory farms, where their lives are nearly entirely determined by human choices. Factory farms, then, are an enormous and terrifying arena for AI-caused harm. Accordingly, when we talk about AI governance and risks from AI, risks to nonhuman animals should be a major part of that conversation, alongside e.g. biorisks and discrimination. Unfortunately, this is basically never the case. For instance, the mostly commendable recent International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI: Interim Report, a long and comprehensive document, with a long and comprehensive name, written by committee and designed to achieve global consensus on AI risks, does not even mention animal welfare risks - does not even mention animals, or agriculture, or anything like that - at all. This blog post is a small attempt to rectify the imbalance. I want to share my thoughts about a specific AI technology: precision livestock farming. I'll argue that, while I am uncertain about whether AI precision farming technology will be good or bad for animal welfare on a per-animal basis, I think we can be much more confident that it will be bad on a total population basis, since it will likely increase the total number of farmed animals. Largely in view of this argument, but also for political feasibility reasons, I think we should consider advocating for restrictions on precision livestock farming in industrial settings. 'AI' can mean a lot of different things When we talk about the effects of AI on animal welfare, it is essential to distinguish different types of AI systems. 'How will AI affect animals?' is uselessly broad. There are a number of different AI technologies we should distinguish between: precision livestock farming, AI genetics and breeding programs, language models used by the general public, AI adoption by activists, AI adoption by alternative protein producers, models used to decode animal thoughts, and others. All quite different, and it's hard to know what the aggregate effect of these technologies will be. A lot of these technologies are important, but my focus here is on precision livestock farming. What is precision livestock farming? Precision livestock farming (PLF), as I understand it, basically means putting in place a bunch of sensors and instruments that gather data about individual farmed animals, and then having some algorithm - this could be a neural network, but might be something much more basic - manage features of the animals' environment, based on the gathered data, in order to 'optimise' farming. The classic example is an automated feeding system, which gathers data about individual animals' feeding behaviour and health and stuff and automatically distributes food in response to the gathered data. In theory, systems like this can be designed to make sure all animals are having a great time. In practice, systems like this will often be designed, I expect, to further intensify animal agriculture. What do we know about the particular technologies that are currently being implemented? According to this paper (Schillings et al, 2021), the f...
…
continue reading
2433 episodes
All episodes
×Welcome to Player FM!
Player FM is scanning the web for high-quality podcasts for you to enjoy right now. It's the best podcast app and works on Android, iPhone, and the web. Signup to sync subscriptions across devices.