Sentientism "The story of our species needs to be re-written in the AI age" - Ronen Bar - The Moral Alignment Center - Sentientism 226
Ronen Bar is a social entrepreneur and the co-founder and former CEO of Sentient, a meta non-profit for animals focused on community building and developing tools tosupport animal rights advocates. He is currently focused on advancing a new community-building initiative, The Moral Alignment Center, to ensure AI development benefits all sentient beings, including animals, humans, and futuredigital minds. For over a decade, his work has been at the intersection of technological innovation and animal advocacy, particularly in the alternative protein and investigative reporting sectors.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips
01:11 Welcome
02:40 Ronen's Intro
- Social entrepreneur "using storytelling to promote reason and compassion for all sentient beings"
- Investigative journalism (care homes then slaughterhousesin Israel and abroad)
- Leading the Sentient NGO, including using on-animal investigative cameras to "enhance animal storytelling... of particular named animals" not just the story of a slaughterhouse
- Alternative protein non-profits
- The Moral Alignment Center "making sure that #ai is apositive force for all sentient beings"
- "What is good?... I don't think those questions are asked enough in the AI space"
- Starting new fields and communities
- How the advent of powerful AI forces us to revisit thesefundamental "what's real?", "what matters?" and "whomatters?" questions
- The ethical question is neglected in AI, but "it is in the minds of people... Ilya Sutskever... Ray Kurtzweil... Sam Altman..."
07:23 What's Real?
- Growing up in Israel "a very religious country" but in a secular family
- Wider relatives #orthodox and ultra-orthodox
- Asking self "what do I know for sure... 100%...? the obvious answer is subjective experiences at this moment"
- Being less sure of everything else but "my subjective experience is certainly true"
- #illusionism ? "It's funny to think of it [subjective experience] as an illusion because subjective experience is the only information you will ever receive in your life"
- "Science is just the discipline... of trying throughrationality to predict the subjective experiences of humans" (even the results of scientific measurements come through our experiences)
- JW: "So if it is an illusion it's still all we've got!"
- "Starting from your own subjective experiences... itactually brings you more compassion... "
29:40 What Matters?
36:00 Who Matters?
41:03 A Better World?
01:33:20 Follow Ronen:
- Moral Alignment Center on LinkedIn
- Email: ronenbar07@gmail.com
And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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