With the influx of new funding, don’t hunt for new problems - stop suffering first

Megaprojects for animals (or an updated version perhaps, this list being from 2022) seems more pertinent than ever. 

After making sure we don't all die, this should be the first priority

Please do not write clickbait titles like this. Put the subject matter in the title.

I strongly agree that the animal welfare implications of AI should be owned at least as much by the AI safety space as by the animal welfare space, not that there needs to be a hard distinction between the two but there is obviously some declarative truth to it. Animal suffering is among the greatest lock-in risks.

I'm worried that many people outside the AW space believe the end of factory farming is a foregone conclusion. At one forum in SF in February mixing leaders from AI safety and AW, many AIS folks came away at least partly convinced by the AW folks that this cannot be taken for granted. AIS needs to take seriously the inside view of AW leaders that AI will not necessarily solve FAW by default, not to mention WAW.

Well said. On top of this, many new interventions are going to be primarily talent constrained, whereas Animal Welfare is primarily funding constrained. Animal Welfare should be prioritized at least until funding is no longer the main constraint. 

Thank you for the post!

Animals are not one issue

I have long wished to write or see an EA forum post about this. Thanks for doing it!

Very well said, it's so sad what happens to so many animals and like you said the list goes on and on. And the funny thing is, we are animals. If AI goes well for animals, that implies it goes well for us. 

But we really don't want speciesist AI. If we have AI that has a moral circle based on species membership, or based on certain capabilities like intelligence, what happens when it gets to the point where we are no longer intelligent enough to qualify, or the only species that's morally relevant is the AI species?

FWIW I agree with the sentiment!

However, I think this post as it stands leans a lot on the Importance dimension of the ITN framework, gestures at Neglectedness, and doesn't directly address Tractability. To be clear, that's fine! Not every post needs to address everything; some of the linked posts address those somewhat; other resources out there do too. 

But I do think that the question of 'what can be done with 100s of extra $bn' is also a question of T and N, and I think part (majority?) of what Ransohoff is saying is that we're woefully unprepared ~1 level down from 'cause area' at the infrastructure / intervention / ecosystem / etc. level (where T and N mostly cash out, IMO).  

If people have or can point to write-ups about how many and what size of shovel-ready projects we have for the various animal problems listed: definitely post and signal boost those!!

Maybe a crux here might be 'what sort of net effect one expects from more or less just spending any amount of $ to hire anyone you can to try to find those projects'. Not saying that's the author's take per se; but I am somewhat skeptical of things shaped like "we need[...] a lot more people working on [X]" if what they mean is 'we need to get warm bodies on this at all costs'. People can have net negative impact! There are opportunity costs to going all-in like that! 

Overall I hope a large chunk of this wave of philanthropy goes to animal welfare, but also that it can be spent well and deployed quickly :)

Great write up! I especially appreciate your one-line descriptions of some of the largest AW issues. Are you aware of any kind of database where these issues are catalogued, and if so, could you point me to it? We have a long list of interventions, but having a long list of discrete welfare issues would be at least equally useful.

I agree that animal welfare is underfunded, but who is this post trying to convince? If funders should fund the most cost-effective interventions or cause areas, then the argument needs to be made on the merits, which are not covered here. Animals don't just automatically win because there is lots of animal suffering today (unless maybe you are a fairly near-termist negative utilitarian).

I really like this framing, especially the push against “problem hunting” when there’s already an overwhelming amount of neglected suffering in front of us. Animals are not “one issue” but instead, the majority of moral patients. This is underappreciated, even within EA.

One thing that resonated from Ransohoff’s piece, though, is the idea that we don’t yet have the ecosystem to absorb a huge influx of capital. I think that applies here too. Even if we take the case for prioritising animals as seriously as we can, it’s not obvious the field is currently set up to productively deploy funding at the scale you’re pointing to (multiple interventions, geographies, and organisations) without hitting bottlenecks or diminishing returns.

That seems less like a reason not to prioritise animals, and more like a reason to invest heavily in building out the space itself: more people, more organisations, better-developed intervention areas, and especially more work on neglected animal populations (which is why what we're now doing feels particularly valuable).

The AI × animals point also feels important and still quite underexplored. It does seem like it falls between existing buckets in a way that makes it easy to overlook, despite potentially being central to the long-term picture.

Overall, I agree with the core concern. There’s a real risk that a wave of new funding ends up looking for new, legible problems while continuing to underinvest in ones that are already vast, tractable, and unsolved. Making sure that doesn’t happen for animals seems like one of the key challenges for this next phase.