We fear and hate AI a lot but it’s nothing compared to the beef industry.
Eating beef not only poisons your body and contributes to torture of cows but it also destroys the planet at a scale that makes even AI feel insignificant.
Turns out we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I want to eliminate animal agriculture and I want to tone down/eliminate ai data centers too. I think animal ag is obviously a big problem, but the bigger problem is getting people to side with you on it.
In the current state, it is easier to focus on the ai nonsense because a lot of people are already in board with hating it. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t focus on getting people on the side of eliminating animal ag too, but that’s a slow process.
The difference is that one directly harms and kills tens of billions of victims, the other one may harm some but not so many.
The prioritization of the focus shouldn’t be based on how easy the fight is, but on how large the injustice is.
Abraham Lincoln could have focused on corruption instead of ending slavery if the focus should be on the easy fights.
If you truly think only the biggest injustice should have priority, then anthropogenic climate change should have your attention, not animal welfare. Quintillions of animals will die from climate change and quintillions more can still be saved. The agriculture industry is a still a pretty big chunk of that, but not as big as fossil fuels, and more importantly the theory of change requires overcoming capitalism and prometheanism in general, rather than allowing itself to be limited to the mere lifestyle change of veganism.
Luckily, that is not the case. Massive systemic change isn’t accomplished by prioritizing single issues one by one, but by forming a shared front of revolutionary solidarity. Veganism should absolutely be part of that, but we’re only better off by also having solidarity with popular anti-capitalist sentiments like the anti-AI movement.
Of course if they don’t want solidarity with the animals that are murdered by the agriculture industry they can fuck off. Or, more diplomatically, they’re welcome to learn solidarity as part of the on-boarding process.
As long as we agree that we shouldn’t prioritize fights because they’re easy, it’s good.
We have to eat anyways, so making the more ethical decision and picking the vegan option is completely different from taking an action and spending time to advocate against oil or whatever other cause. Gong vegan is more like not taking an action while allowing you to fight other fights.
I think about this every time someone mentions water usage by AI datacenters.
Like, really? All of a sudden you care about water usage? Then I got some worrying news for you.
