These examples don't work. Hunter gatherers didn't suffer, and the other two are in outlier bad situations. Set them free in a stable situation and they'll live happy lives.
If that description of wild mice is accurate, there is no happy free life. The baseline is very different. I'm not going to try to say how that should affect the rest of the ethics, but it's an important point to consider, and not as easily dismissed as your examples would imply.
Of course they did and still do. They have far higher rates of infant and child mortality, death from curable disease, starvation, and violent death.
It’s inconsistent to call the natural condition of wild animals, surviving and dying in nature, "no happy free life," then exempt humans living under that same fundamental condition.
How do we draw the line, from which principle that isn’t ex post facto? Do no wild animals have a happy free life? Do all humans? Most? A minority? Across all of human history?
Even in the most cherry-picked minority of cases, someone born into a wealthy developed country, people are frequently born with or develop agonizing diseases. They die of cancer and dementia despite their wealth. They live in grinding poverty, or barely cling to existence through depression, anxiety and alienation. Many suffer so greatly in fact that they commit suicide.
Suffering isn't a state of existence reserved for animals that humans are exempt from except in rare cases.
So if it is not, then is the fact that people suffer tremendously just as a normal fact of life justification for nonconsensual fatal human testing?
You're trying too hard to find suffering. It should have been clear I was comparing to "short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten" and "torture", not to a paradise without disease.
Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
The claim above is about mice. I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim.
I don't know how you can say this, frankly, unless you do not see or experience any of this suffering yourself. If not, you should be extremely grateful for your luck.
You don't have to try hard, at all, to find it.
> Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.
How are you defining this, and again by which principle do you draw this line which isn't some ex post facto version of "well humans are here, so I'm going to say everything to the left of here"?
> I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim
We should be extremely skeptical of this claim because it's so convenient.
It absolves us of the guilt for the tremendous harms we're causing them by proposing something which we would see as obviously absurd if it were applied to us:
"A short, miserable life of having all sorts of horrifying experiments performed on you in a lab is better than being free to live your life and die in the world at large." - Person who benefits from performing experiments on you in a lab
But your attempts to equate it to the human experience are a waste of time. Nobody actually thinks humans (or cats, or bison) face the experience that SoftTalker was trying to describe. When we go by the actual intent of the statement, either it's true and mice but not humans face that, or it's false and neither mice nor humans face that. Any experience that you can say is the human default in full honesty, is not the experience SoftTalker was trying to convey.
> short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten
Ah yes, how silly of me to criticize this as a 2 dimensional statement utterly lacking in self-awareness.
Humans have always enjoyed objectively long lives, and mouse lives are objectively short. Relative to what? Let’s not think about that and while we're at it take the implication for granted that length of a life grants it weight.
This is why we have always honored the fact that tortoise lives are more valuable than those of humans after all.
Borderline starvation is definitely not something millions of humans face every day, or something most of humanity faced for most of history.
Being eaten is so horrible that you’re better off being tortured to death in a lab. Thankfully that has never happened to humans in the wild. Meanwhile, dying of war, famine, cancer or diarrhea is comparatively great, which is why using you in a lab would of course be unthinkable.
Mice struggling for food and survival in the wild are totally different from humans struggling for food and survival in the wild, because, see, uh...
That sentiment is a dismissive, incurious oversimplification of the entire existence of other species. It has so many blind spots, and is seemingly oblivious to the fact the same reasoning could be turned on us. If a hard, short, dangerous life justifies putting a creature in a lab, then a large share of humanity, past and present, would qualify for the same.
> Ah yes, how silly of me to criticize this as a 2 dimensional statement utterly lacking in self-awareness.
You can criticize it but you can't strawman it to oblivion and back.
> objectively
You know what they meant though.
Lines can be set.
And the higher you set the quality of life line, the nicer your lab needs to be to meet the "better than life outside" standard! It's not an excuse for unlimited torture.
> millions of humans
Again, this is about the default. "millions" is 0.1% of humans. And the real number is higher than that but not that much higher.
> Being eaten is so horrible that you’re better off being tortured to death in a lab.
No, that wasn't the argument. And lots of animals we eat do live perfectly good lives.
> Mice struggling for food and survival in the wild are totally different from humans struggling for food and survival in the wild, because, see, uh...
Much much less struggling and starvation and fear fear fear.
You're mocking the statement without trying to understand it. That's rude and extremely unproductive.
Criticize what they meant, not the dumbest interpretation you can think of. Prove their actual intended meaning wrong.
Worth noting that this is an invisibly small part of the sum total of our global efforts, especially versus the much more tangible effort we put into enslaving and slaughtering them, then mangling their carcasses for our own uses as we drive more and more of them to extinction.
We simply don't care about anything beyond ourselves and even there it breaks down on closer analysis when we see how many within our species don't truly value the collective whole beyond themselves.
The problem is not that AIs will somehow treat people badly, it's that they'll be controlled by humans who will treat other people badly using AI as a tool.
> enslaving and slaughtering them, then mangling their carcasses for our own uses as we drive more and more of them to extinction.
I'm frankly offended by this mischaracterization of human-animal relationships. So called "slaves" like horses and dogs have been dearly beloved companions for centuries and actively seek our companionship too.
The animals we raise for slaughter are often mistreated, yes, but many humans treat them with respect; billions on billions are voluntarily spent to improve their condition. Despite our own needs, many people pay higher prices for animal products that involve better treatment of animals. And they are in no risk of extinction! Much to the contrary, their domestic variants would not exist if humans didn't raise and protect them.
> We simply don't care about anything beyond ourselves
I think you’re splitting hairs. The OP’s analogy works well.
If we end up in a future where AIs have as much concern for our welfare as we have for the welfare of the average animal (not the minuscule percentage of domesticated dogs, but the overwhelming majority of factory-farmed or simply driven to extinction), then I doubt you would consider it a “mischaracterization” to say that the whole AI thing did not work out to our advantage.
Bringing up “modern Westerners with their dogs” as a counterexample is almost self-parody.
> The animals we raise for slaughter are often mistreated
"Often mistreated". Dude, they are held in tiny cages injected with hormones and what not till we kill them so we can have a big mac. It's very hard to argue we do any of this for nutrition reasons, we do it because we like the taste of burgers and roast.
> I'm frankly offended by this mischaracterization of human-animal relationships.
Are you more offended than you are over the brutality of our relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom? Seems like Victorian pearl clutching.
> So called "slaves" like horses and dogs have been dearly beloved companions for centuries and actively seek our companionship too.
No idea why you have quotes around slaves. You've heard of the horse-drawn carriage, wagon, carts. People still ride and use horses as beasts of burden around the world.
I was on Gili Trawangan recently, which has no internal combustion engines. You have horse drawn carriages, and now more recently electric mopeds.
The horses are nearly blind due to their masks and have a metal bit threaded through their mouth they can never extract. Their backs are covered in open bleeding sores as their harnesses rub against them with every step while they strain to pull people and their luggage up and down the island all day long, every day.
Have you heard of horse racing, dog racing? What do they do to those animals?
Have you heard of animal testing, on dogs even? Do you think those dogs that are having their skin peeled off, toxic chemicals forced into their lungs and veins, living and dying in agony feel dearly beloved?
There's a nice documentary on the testing on beagles called "Animal People", I'd suggest watching it.
Even the pet industry, do you know what a puppy mill is? Do you know what the dog meat industry is? Do you understand the conditions that the majority of dogs on earth are born into, live in, and die in?
This perspective you're expressing is a Disney cartoon hallucination that has nothing to do with the character of our world.
> The animals we raise for slaughter
What about the ones we use for fur, leather, experimentation, entertainment, hunting for sport, the ones being driven to extinction by habitat destruction, overfishing, the countless species drawn up and killed as bycatch by our fishing fleets...
There are series of videos produced in Southeast Asia and sold online of people torturing baby macaques to death. Amputating their limbs, lighting them on fire, keeping them alive through this over days and weeks and months.
There are restaurants in China that will descale, gut, sear, and serve a fish to you without killing it so that it is still breathing as you tear bits of flesh off it and eat it on your plate.
You can eat live octopus whole at many Japanese restaurants.
Everywhere you go in Thailand you see cockfighting.
> are often mistreated
If you were subjected to what we do to animals in animal industry, do you think you'd be so timid to characterize what we do as mistreatment?
> many people pay higher prices for animal products
Over 99% of meat sold in the US comes from factory farming, and globally economics trumps all other considerations in this conversation. Welfare is an afterthought, and primarily a marketing concept.
1 in 200,000,000 may win the lottery, that does not mean investing in the lottery is a wise way to make money.
The whitewashing of grass fed, local, humane blah blah is bullshit in the majority of cases, and serves just to extract more money from consumers and salve their conscience.
Even in the 0.001% of farm animals' lives that match this idealistic vision, if you yourself had a great life, would you want your throat slit?
> And they are in no risk of extinction
We are currently in a mass extinction. Are you arguing that wiping out virtually all the earth's biodiversity to replace it with cows, pigs, chicken, sheep is a net good for the the animal kingdom?
> their domestic variants would not exist if humans didn't raise and protect them.
Imagine I tell you there's a breed of human we could bring into existence through eugenics and genetic engineering that would experience perfect agony every moment of its existence. Every nerve in its body firing nonstop 24/7 as if it was bathed in fire. Its only form of communication with the outside world a constant scream.
Should it be thankful for its existence? Should we say "well the only reason it even gets to exist is because we raise and protect them"?
At what point along the spectrum of perfect bliss to perfect agony do we say maybe it's not a good thing to bring this being into existence? Maybe we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back for what we're doing to them?
> Have you seen modern westerners with their dogs??
Yes, what percentage of the time, money, and energy of modern westerners would you say goes towards positive treatment of their dogs, versus all the other activities and pursuits that constitute the rest of their lifespans (including feeding those dogs the body parts of tortured animals) that contribute directly or indirectly to animal suffering, as well as the destruction of the natural world and the animals who live within it?
Nope. Just people who want candidates who can beat terrible people like Trump. It really isn't that hard. Biden did it.
We live in a two party system. Winning elections is important. Fielding left-wing candidates with no accomplishments makes Trump happen. It's not that complicated.
>Fielding left-wing candidates with no accomplishments makes Trump happen. It's not that complicated.
Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and a Senator from New York, while Kamala Harris was a District Attorney and Attorney General, and then Senator for California before serving as Vice President.
Also only in the fetid delirium of Republicans and Trumpists are either of them even remotely left-wing.
The typical American views a businessman who built (and lied and stole) a company as more experienced than senator who signs mostly bills that rename post offices.
The Democrats continue to insist that this isn't the case. And keep losing.
So the typical American, when selecting for a political job, holds a man with no political experience but who was so corrupt and inept as a businessman he managed to bankrupt a casino in higher esteem than candidates with actual success and experience in the field selected for?
Fine. The typical American is an idiot and they get what they deserve, then.
>The Democrats continue to insist that this isn't the case. And keep losing.
It shouldn't be the case, the Democrats are correct (at least about that, although I suspect they never actually "insisted" on anything of the sort,) Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton were more qualified than Trump and deserved to win, and I hope this whole clownshow of a country burns to the ground.
I leave the floor to you, matchbok3. I've exposed myself to Hacker News for too long and I need time in the screaming box.
Isn't it insane that even in the face of complete annihilation through one of our inventions, we go "that wasn't us"? We deserve that shit ten times over
Their X post[1] indicated that they've been trying to combat reselling subscription plans via token API gateways and at the same time many, many people, myself included, have seen a drastic drop in available weekly capacity for the same amount of queries/tokens, all else being equal. So they may be trying to make subscriptions and API access more equal to each other from both ends.
Hm, seems to be a bit of a contradiction between what you’re saying in terms of “insurers want to pay more” and the infamous tendency of insurers to deny claims as much as possible?
Well, they also need to ensure they aren't spending past their premiums coming in...
Alot of insurers the past few years have actually gone bankrupt from ballooning costs and claims.
So, they want costs to go up, so the next year they can up the premiums, so they can then up their admin spend, but the costs still need to below the premium. And they can't just up the premium without an associated rise in cost, because groups are owed their premium money back if it isn't paid out.
Why are we even playing games about implications when we can see the empirical fact that the admin’s policies on Palestine over the last years have been to carpet bomb people?
The funny thing is it doesn’t even code well. It’s still worse than OpenAI, Anthropic, and the leading open source models.
So you get worse outcomes while also financially supporting one of the most prolific pushers of race wars, the destruction of labor rights, environmental protections, and general misinformation.
Truly a win-win?
Contrary to your framing it seems to only reason to use Grok at this point would be ideological.
It's a better deal compared to those is what I said. It codes well enough so that's why people use it. As I said, go to r/cursor and you'll find loads of people using it while OpenAI and Anthropic are more expensive per token and give less usage.
What about people from Gaza?
Is it acceptable to do human testing as long as you pull the humans out of say east Africa during a famine?