Originally appeared in meatingplace
The ways in which Artificial Intelligence will change our society are still shaking out. The industry itself, however, is a major threat to animal agriculture. But not in the way you might assume.
For the past 10 years, the animal rights movement has been flush with cash from one major donor: California billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and founder of the company Asana. He has given more than $400 million to animal rights groups over the past decade, according to records by his Open Philanthropy network (now rebranded as Coefficient Giving).
But the AI industry may become Moskovitz times 1-.
What fuels Moskovitz is a philosophy called Effective Altruism (EA), which believes, among other things, that modern large-scale livestock farming needs to be eliminated. One of the intellectual godfathers of EA is Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation.
EA is popular in the San Francisco tech community. Several heads of lab-grown meat companies are tied to the movement. Convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was another believer.
And so are a number of folks in the AI tech companies. People who stand to become quite wealthy when AI companies go public, as Anthropic reportedly plans to do in the coming months.
According to the man who helps direct Moskovitz’s giving to animal rights groups, people in the AI industry have already put $40 million into anti-farming groups already this year. In June, the Chief of Staff of a major AI company co-hosted a fundraiser to help fight efforts in Congress to rein in California Prop 12.
Since then, an anonymously funded political action committee has launched a multimillionaire campaign on that very issue. Coincidence? I doubt it.
$40 million could be the tip of the iceberg. Many AI executives have pledged to give away most of their expected fortunes. Some observers expect wealthy AI executives to send up to $30 billion a year to whatever causes they want. And opposing livestock farming is on the list.
Animal rights activists are already working to get a slice of that pie, with Peter Singer saying the Anthropic money “could greatly affect the issues that I’ve been concerned with … it could have a huge effect on reducing the suffering of [farm] animals.”
The irony here is that the AI industry is poised to attack the very thing whose support it needs: rural America.
AI needs data centers to operate. And it needs a lot of them.
The widespread backlash against data centers over the past year means these facilities are not getting built in cities and suburbs. They’re being built in rural areas where there are fewer people. But they’ll still need local support from county commissioners, residents, politicians and business leaders.
That means rural America will have a great deal of leverage over the AI industry moving forward. It should act wisely, but it shouldn’t be afraid to use its leverage against those whose vision for the future is to radically change food production and put farmers and ranchers out of business.
Jack Hubbard is the executive director at the Center for the Environment and Welfare