A Venn diagram of people interested in how AI will shape our future, and members of the effective altruism community (often abbreviated to EA), would show a lot of overlap. One of the rising stars in this overlap is our guest in this episode, the polymath Jacy Reese Anthis.
Our discussion picks up themes from Jacy's 2018 book “The End of Animal Farming”, including an optimistic roadmap toward an animal-free food system, as well as factors that could alter that roadmap.
We also hear about the work of an organisation co-founded by Jacy: the Sentience Institute, which researches - among other topics - the expansion of moral considerations to non-human entities. We discuss whether AIs can be sentient, how we might know if an AI is sentient, and whether the design choices made by developers of AI will influence the degree and type of sentience of AIs.
The conversation concludes with some ideas about how various techniques can be used to boost personal effectiveness, and considers different ways in which people can relate to the EA community.
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
Some follow-up reading:
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/
https://jacyanthis.com/
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