You can give me feedback here (anonymous or not). You are welcome to answer any of the following:
Do you have any thoughts on the value (or lack thereof) of my posts?
Do you have any ideas for posts you think I would like to write?
Are there any opportunities you think would be a good fit for me which are either not listed on 80,000 Hours' job board, or are listed there, but you guess I might be underrating them?
How I can help others
Feel free to check my posts, and see if we can collaborate to contribute to a better world. I am open to part-time volunteering and paid work. In this case, I typically ask for 20 $/h, which is roughly equal to 2 times the global real GDP per capita.
We estimate that GWWC's marginal 2025 giving multiplier is around 13x – for every additional $1 they spend on promoting pledging, around $13 will be raised for GiveWell top charities [1]. Uncertainty is high and caution in interpreting results is advised.
Open Philanthropy's (OP's) bar is around 2 times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities. You got a multiplier of 13 which is significantly higher than 2, and therefore suggests OP is underfunding GWWC. Does OP think the multiplier is much closer to 2, or are they limiting themselves to providing at most a given fraction of GWWC's funding? @JamesSnowden may have feedback here.
It seems important to distinguish between a) the abolition of factory farming and b) a long-term change in human attitudes towards animals (i.e. establishing antispeciesism). b) is arguably more important from a long-term perspective, and it is a legitimate concern cultivated meat (and similar technologies) would only achieve a).
There is another concern if one has the goal of increasing welfare instead of abolishing factory-farming:
I wonder whether decreasing the current consumption of farmed animals may be bad for future farmed animals (I did not mention this here). According to my calculations, an improvement in chicken welfare per time equal to 43.9 % (= 0.580/(-0.580 + 1.90)) of that linked to going from a conventional cage to a cage-free aviary would be enough to reach neutrality, which suggests there may be chickens with positive lives in the next few decades if corporate campaigns continue to be at least decently successful.
Efforts to reduce the consumption of animals decrease the chance of futures where there are lots of factory-farmed animals living good lives, so such efforts may decrease welfare. One can counter that animals would have to be too expensive for them to live good lives, but this does not seem true. Hens in cage-free aviaries are more expensive that ones in conventional cages, but the increase in welfare is quite large. Assuming the increase in welfare is proportional to the increase in price, the increase in price from cage-free aviaries to conditions as positive as those of cage-free aviaries are negative would be 87.8 % (= 2*0.439) the increase in price from conventional cages to cage-free aviaries. Economic growth over the next few decades, potentially boosted by transformative AI, also means consuming animals with better lives will be more affordable.
It looks like decreasing the consumption of animals is only robustly good (in terms of increasing welfare) if one is confident that factory-farmed animals will continue to have negative lives?
I wonder whether decreasing the current consumption of farmed animals may be bad for future farmed animals (I did not mention this here). According to my calculations, an improvement in chicken welfare per time equal to 43.9 % (= 0.580/(-0.580 + 1.90)) of that linked to going from a conventional cage to a cage-free aviary would be enough to reach neutrality, which suggests there may be chickens with positive lives in the next few decades if corporate campaigns continue to be at least decently successful.
Efforts to reduce the consumption of animals decrease the chance of futures where there are lots of factory-farmed animals living good lives, so such efforts may decrease welfare. One can counter that animals would have to be too expensive for them to live good lives, but this does not seem true. Hens in cage-free aviaries are more expensive that ones in conventional cages, but the increase in welfare is quite large. Assuming the increase in welfare is proportional to the increase in price, the increase in price from cage-free aviaries to conditions as positive as those of cage-free aviaries are negative would be 87.8 % (= 2*0.439) the increase in price from conventional cages to cage-free aviaries. Economic growth over the next few decades, potentially boosted by transformative AI, also means consuming animals with better lives will be more affordable.
It looks like decreasing the consumption of animals is only robustly good (in terms of increasing welfare) if one is confident that factory-farmed animals will continue to have negative lives?
Farmed animals are neglected, where I conclude the annual disability of farmed animals is much larger than that of humans, whereas the annual funding helping farmed animals is much smaller than that helping humans:
How much weight do you think should one allocate to the inside and outside view respectively in order to develop a comprehensive estimate of the potential future unemployment rate?
It is hard for me to answer this. It depends on the methodology used to produce the inside view estimate. If this is just a guess from someone working on AI safety, I would put very little weight on it. If it is the output of a detailed quantitative empirical model like Epoch AI's, I could as a 1st approximation ignore the estimates from my post (although I would have to check the model to know).
Especially because I think this ignores the apparent fact that the development of intelligent systems that are more capable than humans has never occurred in history. This fundamentally changes the game.
Task automation has been happening for a long time (with the unemployment rate still being low), and one can think about advanced AI as a continuation of that trend. In addition, the definition of unemployment I used requires both not having a job and being actively looking for one. For sometime in the next few decades to centuries, I predict negligible human unemployment and roughly total AI automation (i.e. almost no human workers). I guess humans will just be happy letting the AIs do everything, and whoever wants to have a job (which will be a little bit of a fake job, as AIs would be able to perform the tasks more efficiently) will also have the chance to do it, i.e. there will be basically no humans actively looking for a job, and having no success (i.e. essentially no unemployment). More pessimistically, it is also possible to have almost total homelessness with negligible unemployment in a dystopian scenario where humans gave up looking for jobs because AIs are so much better, but still kind enough to give humans a subsistence income.
I know you are not saying that the inside view doesn't matter, but I am concerned that a post like this anchors people toward a base rate that is a lot lower than what things will actually be like. It reinforces status quo bias.
According to Table 1 (2) of Hanson 2000, the global economy used to double once every 230 k (224 k) years in hunting and gathering period of human history. Today it doubles once every 20 years or so[1]. Despite a much higher growth rate, the unemployment rate is still relatively low. So I do not think one can predict massive unemployment solely on the basis of AI boosting economic growth. Note am discussing what could happen in the real world, not what could happen in the absence of any mitigation actions.
I think it makes a lot of sense to reason bottom-up when thinking about topics like these, and I actually disagree with you a lot.
What is your median annual unemployment rate in the US in 2025, 2026 or 2027? If much higher than now, I am happy to set up a bet with you where:
I give you 10 k€ if the rate is higher than your median.
You give me 10 k€ if the rate is lower than your median, which I would donate to animal welfare interventions.
My medians are not far from the ones suggested by historical data below, although I would want to think more about them if I was to bet 10 k€.
Do you know how the relative reduction in the suffering per living time compares with the relative reduction in the growth rate? The total suffering is proportional to former, but inversely proportional to the latter. For example, if the suffering per time is halved, but so is the growth rate, there would be no change in the overall suffering (because there would need to be 2 times as many chickens). So it is important that the reduction in the suffering per living time exceeds the reduction in the growth rate.
Based on data from the Welfare Footprint Project, and some guesses from me, I estimate going from a conventional to a reformed scenario results in a reduction in the suffering per living time of 69.5 % (= (-1.52 - (-4.99))/(-(-4.99))), an increase in the number of broilers of 25.2 % (= 1.34*10^3/(1.07*10^3) - 1), and therefore in a reduction in the overall suffering of 59.2 % (= 1 - (1 - 0.695)/(1 - 0.252)). So I assume your ask will also reduce overall suffering, but it is worth having these dynamics in mind for breed selection.
Changing to a slower growing breed may be good even if it results in an increase in the overall suffering nearterm. Subsequent changes to higher welfare breeds could render the lives of broilers net positive, in which case having a slower growing breed would increase welfare via leading to a larger population.
Thanks for the discussion, Toby. I do not plan to follow up further, but, for reference/transparency, I maintain my guess that the future is astronomically valuable, but that no interventions are astronomically cost-effective.
It is not a strict requirement, but it is an arguably reasonable assumption. Are there any interventions whose estimates of (posterior) counterfactual impact, in terms of expected total hedonistic utility (not e.g. preventing the extinction of a random species), do not decay to 0 in at most a few centuries? From my perspective, their absence establishes a strong prior against persistent/increasing effects.
Thanks for the analysis, Joel!
Open Philanthropy's (OP's) bar is around 2 times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities. You got a multiplier of 13 which is significantly higher than 2, and therefore suggests OP is underfunding GWWC. Does OP think the multiplier is much closer to 2, or are they limiting themselves to providing at most a given fraction of GWWC's funding? @JamesSnowden may have feedback here.