Zach Freitas-Groff

The Future of Life Institute released a letter today to the UN’s Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) conveying concerns regarding lethal autonomous weapons (signed by Elon Musk and covered in The Washington Post and elsewhere). The concerns are grave: Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close. We therefore implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers. I used to be unduly dismissive of far future concerns (as did many other EAs ), but I've been persuaded by books like Superintelligence that g...

The Washington Post  this weekend had a sharply-worded editorial condemning efforts to disenfranchise voters with which I of course agree, but the editorial missed the crucial point. Here's the key paragraph: Yet even if all 1,500 Confederate symbols across the country were removed overnight by some sudden supernatural force, the pernicious crusade to roll back voting rights would continue apace, with voters of color suffering its effects disproportionately. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era. All the forms of voter suppression listed deserve to be combatted, but the chief cause of disenfranchisement in the United States is one that is still rarely challenged: disenfranchisement of those with felony convictions. It's difficult to get a good estimate of the number of people prevented from voting...

Source: http://www.nyanimalag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CowsFeeding5.jpg Pooh-poohing the weakness of mainstream political parties toward Big Ag is rightly a hobby for animal advocates. The laxness (or supportiveness) of U.S. federal and state agencies toward Big Ag is strikingly out of step with the American public .  Animal advocates should be heartened this week  by a piece in The Nation that argues that Democrats can seize the current anti-corporate fervor to challenge the Cargills and Smithfields of the world. The wrinkles of the piece, though, lay out some more complex strategic challenges than animal advocates may notice. The article introduces us to Joe Maxwell, "a fourth-generation hog farmer and former lieutenant governor of Missouri" who led the fight against Oklahoma's "Right to Farm" bill, which ended in a rout of Big Ag. A "Right to Farm" bill is well worth fighting. So too are efforts to up the ante on USDA regulations and enf...

"[O]n April 21, 2017, in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir state, a mob brutally attacked five members of a nomad cattle-herding family, including a 9-year-old girl, on suspicion that they were taking their cows for slaughter. A video posted on social media showed a group of men chanting slogans commonly used by BJP supporters, breaking down the family’s shelter, beating an elderly man with rods and sticks even as women begged for mercy, and finally setting the shelter on fire." This episode is the latest in a trend sweeping India of "cow protection" that has won praise and accolades from some animal advocates, from up and down my newsfeed, and from Leonardo DiCaprio . The tide has swept high enough that India recently banned the sale of cows for slaughter . It's now reached the point at which the movement turns to violence, high on its own success . What should animal rights activists make of this movement? The turn to violence is something to op...

  Trump Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch on a fishing expedition with Antonin Scalia As much as Trump promises to empower the most extreme voices on civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and immigration, animal advocates have long had good reason to fear the Trump administration. Trump's ties to notorious ag empresarios and persecutors of activists from Forrest Lucas of Protect the Harvest to Bruce Rastetter of "ag gag" fame give cause for worry. Despite this all, potentially the most important - that is, damaging - nomination for animals is Trump's Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch. Why the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court touches on all sorts of issues - LGBTQ+ and women's rights, voting rights, civil liberties, federalism, etc. - but when has it ever played a major role in animal rights? How could we even predict how a Supreme Court nominee would rule? Trump with nominee Neil Gorsuch The thing to note is that while nominations, personal ties, regulati...

Economist Chris Blattman (a Principal Investigator where I work, Innovations for Poverty Action ) writes an on-point criticism of Bill Gates's push for donating chickens at Vox, but he misses a major cost. It's a cost that many of the forefathers of modern welfare economics, like Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill noted well ahead of their time. The cost is the lifelong suffering and complete obliteration of individuals - chickens - who possess all the morally relevant characteristics of economic agents for welfare economists to consider them. There are many reasons why economists ignore animal suffering when analyzing agriculture. One is likely simple speciesism . There's a deeper set of reasons that I think make economists ignore animal suffering, though, and they show how far modern economics has strayed from its roots in many ways. The reasons start with this: a refusal to make a "moral" judgment. The basic premise of modern welfare economics is that t...

Though the end of 2016 was greeted by most people I know with a sigh of relief and by pundits as being the end of a very bad year, people who look carefully at the evidence on social trends have been pushing back.  Economist Max Roser  and representatives of  Innovations for Poverty Action  (where I work part-time) both recently wrote columns in the Washington Post about why 2016 was, in fact, a great year for humanity. Worldwide poverty continued its massive decline, and there was no great increase in violence despite what people seem to think, leaving us still far ahead of humanity and pretty much any time in the past when it comes to the likelihood of dying a violent death, as psychologist Steven Pinker chronicles in the  Better Angels of Our Nature  and a more recent  interview . All in all, humanity is likely doing better now than we were a year ago, in a continuation of an ongoing trend. Odd, though, that so many people think thin...