“Making AI Welfare an EA priority requires justifications that have not been given” by JWS

Author's Note: Written in a slightly combative tone [1]as I have found the arguments for the proposition this week to be insufficiently compelling for the debate statement at hand. Also, I'm very rushed getting this out in time so I with more time I would probably have focused more on the ideas and had more time to add nuance and caveats. I apologise in advance for my shortcomings, and hope you can take the good parts of it and overlook the bad. Parsing the Debate statement correctly means that supporting it entails supporting radical changes to EA The statement for AI Welfare Debate Week (hereafter AWDW) is “AI welfare should be an EA priority”. However, expanding this with the clarifications provided by the Forum team leads to the expanded statement: "5%+ of unrestricted EA talent and funding should be focused on the potential well-being of future artificial intelligence systems". [...] ---Outline:(00:33) Parsing the Debate statement correctly means that supporting it entails supporting radical changes to EA(02:40) These changes can only be justified if the case to do so is strongly justified(03:54) Most posts on AI Welfare Debate Week have failed to make this case(04:00) The burden of proof for prioritising AI Welfare requires stronger arguments(05:13) The justifications that are provided seem rather weak(08:42) Working on AI Welfare can still be valuable and interesting(09:40) Conclusion: A Win by Default?The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI. --- First published: July 7th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rdaRk9yXCLartHCdr/making-ai-welfare-an-ea-priority-requires-justifications --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.