David Pearce

And from the recent London conference: www.hedweb.com/ai-for-anima...

Thank you I'd guess at least 70%-80% of conference participants believe in digital sentience. In my talk
www.hedweb.com/ai-for-anima...
I expressed scepticism. But it's vital to avoid morally catastrophic error.

What will be the date of the world's last unpleasant experience?
www.hedweb.com/hedethic/int...

Most people still view suffering as inevitable. And naively, the existence of a food chain, for example, is as inescapable as the second law of thermodynamics. But blueprints exist for a genetically reformed post-suffering biosphere. What's needed now is political genius for their implementation.

Expressing disbelief in perception is apt to make one sound a solipsist. But no...
www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.h...

YouTube video by WeaponizingPessimism The Problem of Bliss: The Hedonistic Imperative

A critique of HI from "WeaponizingPessimism":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ8x...
Maybe instead we can Weaponize Optimism with weapons of mass euphoria or a utilitronium shockwave.

YouTube video by Artificially Aware Why You Cling to Suffering When Bliss Is Possible

Let's replace the biology of suffering with a more civilized signalling system:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBva...

Thank you.
Step number one is low-tech. Outlaw slaughterhouses.

I see cats from a mouse's perspective. But this view is not widely shared among humans, so I urge herbivorizarion:
bltc-media.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ai-for-anima...

Nociception is vital; pain is optional. There are more civilized signalling systems than the traditional pleasure-pain axis, not least a pleasure-superpleasure axis. And our intelligent machines dispense with the signalling function of valence / hedonic tone altogether.

Thanks for letting me know. Much appreciated. Fixed!
bltc-media.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ai-for-anima...

The slides for my talk at the AI for animals conference: www.hedweb.com/ai-for-anima...
and the talk:
bltc-media.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ai-for-anima...

and AI for Animals Berkeley 2025:
bltc-media.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ai-for-anima...
www.hedweb.com/ai-for-anima...

Sure! Catnip-laced cultured meat for members of the cat family. The road to a civilized biosphere is going to be messy.
But sentient beings should harm each other. Humans now have the tools to make this happen.
But first: let's shut the death factories.

Eating the flesh of a dead cow, human or other creature that has died of natural causes isn't inherently morally objectionable. But human frailty means that establishing taboos against flesh consumption is probably wise.

Rewriting our genetic source code can replace the biology of pain & suffering with a more civilized signalling system: life based on information-sensitive gradients of well-being. Synthetic gene drives that cheat the "laws" of Mendelian inheritance can deliver hedonic uplift across the tree of life.

Our most urgent priority should be ending factory-farming and slaughterhouses.
So why have a debate about wild animal suffering now?
Well, if we _don't_ explore the issues, then animal advocates may misspend time and resources on misguided initiatives like "re-wilding".

This should take less than 60 seconds: www.hedweb.com/social-media...
If you want to dig deeper, there are hotlinks.

We are discussing the long-term future of the biosphere, not a Five Year Plan.

A democratically elected world government and/or all-female governance would dramatically reduce organized violence between coalitions of human male primates.
But this is a topic for another thread.

Hence the case for working out the technical details in exhausting and exhaustive depth. CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives, in particular, are a game-changer.
Uncomfortable?
Being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive is frightful. So is starving to death.
Life doesn't have to be this way.

Cruelty-free cultured meat and farm-free animal products will be readily available later this century for human and nonhuman animals alike. They are stopgaps before mature genome reform.

In front of Christians, I might stress how Jesus' fabled miracle of the loaves and the fishes prefigured cruelty-free cultured meat.
Know your audience.

In a nutshell, let's fix the problem of suffering and create a happy, peaceful biosphere via biotech:
www.hedweb.com/social-media...

I'm a secular scientific rationalist. But when addressing a conservative audience, it's good to stress how the vision of a non-violent living world has ancient toots.

Indeed. The level of suffering in the living world will shortly be ad adjustable parameter. What level is optimal? The whole biosphere is programmable. For better or worse, humans are acquiring Godlike powers over the rest of the living world. So should we be benevolent gods or callous gods?

Thank you. I look forward to being superseded by machine superintelligence, but in the meantime, here are 250,000 words of my deathless prose:
www.hedweb.com/quora/index....

Bless you. Yes, there is a powerful case for genome reform and a more civilized signalling system. But status quo bias runs deep.

You're very kind. I normally try to steelman opposing views before critiquing them. But this is hard when all one gets is a stream of ad hominems!

If you have a substantive argument to make, then I promise I'll do my fallible best to respond!