Not to derail, but the optimist in me thinks if we suddenly gained the ability to converse with livestock, we'd stop eating so much of them since they could tell us how much they suffered.

The cynic in me says it wouldn't change a thing as plenty of people know the horrors factory farmed animals face and still continue to consume them anyways.

Hopefully GPT 8 will treat as a bit better than we treat the cows.

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idiotsecant an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How much do we care about refugees and other castaways of the modern world? They can tell us how much they suffer.

The answer is that humans are inherently only capable of local empathy, on average. We have enough empathy to cover the local tribal unit and that's about it.

	▲	lisplist 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		True, I was thinking about this rebuttal but decided not to include it in my comment. There's a difference between not choosing to take a refugee into your home vs actively making that refugee's life worse. Similarly, you can't fix factory farming on your own, but you could skip meat once a week to make the problem slightly less bad. There are so many issues though that we all have to pick and choose what's important to us. My hope is that AI, while probably causing great societal turmoil in the short term, leads to such abundance that a) everyone can live a dignified existence, and b) we'll have such great alternatives to animal products that nobody will chose to consume animals anymore due to its replacement either tasting better, being cheaper, etc. The cynic in me says we'll all just be rendered useless and disposable by AI, but I'm doing my best to look for silver linings for the sake of my own mental health.

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patcon an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm trying to be optimistic about the animal thing too tbh :)