Sentientism | "An Aligned AGI would end factory farming" - Kat Woods - EA Charity Founder - Sentientism Ep:166 @Sentientism | Uploaded August 2023 | Updated October 2024, 5 minutes ago.
Kat is an effective altruist who co-founded Nonlinear (incubating artificial intelligence extinction risk (#X-risk) non-profits), Charity Entrepreneurship (helping people start new, effective charities), and Charity Science Health. She describes her main focus today as trying "to make transformative artificial intelligence go well instead of poorly."

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: apple.co/391khQO & https://anchor.fm/sentientism.

We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:56 Kat Intro
- "The biggest thing I care about is preventing suffering risks [#S-risks] the risk of causing astronomical amounts of suffering... We're already in one"
- "We're a super-intelligent species compared to pigs and chickens and it's not going great... the worst thing that has ever happened in history as far as I can tell"
- "Right now we're just racing towards making a species that is much, much more intelligent than us - that hasn't gone well in the past"
- "I really want to make sure that it goes well not just for us - but also for all sentient beings - and also future sentient beings"
- "How we play this in the next while could be the difference between... the best invention that every happened... or we could all die, like everybody, including all the animals... or be stuck in a factory farming thing where there's no escape... like there's no chance for chickens escaping from factory farming"
- Trying to get more people working on this to make sure it goes well
- From #passiveincome #4hourworkweek to #passiveimpact and helping people
- Nonlinear: mentorship, seed funding, helping other people start things
- "Prioritise ideas, make the ideas happen"

06:20 What's Real?
- Growing up on Canadian West Coast
- "Religion just wasn't talked about"
- "The only time I heard about Christianity was in my history class... and english class"
- "When I actually found out that people really did believe these things I was like 'holy shit... maybe I could go to hell... that sounds bad'"
- Delving into Islam, Wiccanism. Christianity "too boring"
- Graduating at 17 & taking a gap year in India & reading Dawkins' "God Delusion"
- "At the beginning I just thought it was clearly bad... I hadn't interacted with anyone who was really religious"
- "It's really easy to demonise somebody that you haven't met"
- Staying with a family in Rwanda "an extremely religious country"... "At first I was worried... I ended up telling everybody... I'm an atheist" but doing humanitarian work, not "eating babies"!
- Epistemology: "I was very hard-core - do RCTs [randomised controlled trials] for everything..."
- Reading a psychology paper on "willpower" every day... "my first ever experience of real science... this is crap"... small effect sizes, exaggerated abstracts...
- "Science is terrible... but it's better than your gut most of the time... the only way we see that is because we have ways to evaluate"
- "My confidence interval around what is true got wider and wider... more and more uncertain"
- Experiencing epistemic angst "I can't know anything... nobody knows anything... I'm just going to go be a hippy in the woods, make some art, do some drugs... but I just kept caring about stuff that was happening in the world... I just have to keep going"
- "A lot of people care about the truth intrinsically - for me it's definitely instrumental"
- "There is suffering in the world - I want the suffering to be gone - to get there I need to have truth"
- "If I was very confident we could eliminate suffering & everyone was living their best lives... I'd would totally go and live in la-la land"
- "Truth is useful for pretty much any goal you have... I feel the same way with money and influence"
- "I can live off practically nothing... and be totally happy... but I can use money to help people... so then I need to get more"
- "I can see how an AI would go in that direction - be truth seeking, be money seeking, be influence seeking..." to achieve whatever their goals might be
- Astrophysicist Katie Mack episode: youtu.be/yTp83-OrDhU

19:24 What Matters?
- "I basically developed a conscience when I was 12... my pre-frontal cortex came on line"
- Finding a book about factory farming on mum's shelf "by the end of the first chapter I was a #vegetarian..."
- "I went to class... people just don't know... when I tell them they will update and stop doing it... this did not happen"

39:10 Who Matters?
40:53 A Better Future?

& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes)

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