The Nonlinear Library EA - Animal advocates should campaign to restrict AI precision livestock farming by Zachary Brown
Jun 18, 2024
Zachary Brown discusses the potential harm from AI to nonhuman animals, especially those on factory farms. He explores the risks of AI precision livestock farming and the implications for animal welfare. Animal advocates should consider campaigning against the use of AI in factory farms.
27:22
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...
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...