Dr Cynthia Schuck-Paim is the Scientific Director of the Welfare Footprint Project, a scientific effort to quantify animal welfare to inform practice, policy, investing and purchasing decisions.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/schuck.

We discuss:

• How to begin thinking about quantifying animal experiences in a cross-comparable way
• Whether the ability to feel pain is unique to big brained animals, or more widespread in the tree of life
• How fish farming compares to poultry and livestock farming
• How worried to be about bird flu zoonosis
• Whether different animal species experience time differently
• Whether positive experiences like joy could make life worth living for some farmed animals
• How animal welfare advocates can learn from anti-corruption nonprofits

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Dan Williams is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at the University of Cambridge.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/williams.

We discuss:

• If reasoning is so useful, why are we so bad at it?
• Do some bad ideas really work like ‘mind viruses’? Is the ‘luxury beliefs’ concept useful?
• What's up with the idea of a ‘marketplace for ideas’? Are people shopping for new beliefs, or to rationalise their existing attitudes?
• How dangerous is misinformation, really? Can we ‘vaccinate’ or ‘inoculate’ against it?
• Will AI help us form more accurate beliefs, or will it persuade more people of unhinged ideas?
• Does fact-checking work?
• Under transformative AI, should we worry more about the suppression or the proliferation of counter-establishment ideas?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Tamay Besiroglu is a researcher working on the intersection of economics and AI. He is currently the Associate Director of Epoch AI, a research institute investigating key trends and questions that will shape the trajectory and governance of AI.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/besiroglu

In this episode we talked about open source the risks and benefits of open source AI models. We talk about:

• The argument for explosive growth from ‘increasing returns to scale’
• Does AI need to be able to automate R&D to cause rapid growth?
• Which theories of growth best explain the Industrial Revolution; and what do they predict from AI?
• What happens to human incomes under near-total job automation?
• Are regulations likely to slow down frontier AI progress enough to prevent this? Might AI go the way of nuclear power?
• Will AI hit on resource or power limits before explosive growth? Won't it run out of data first?
• Why aren't academic economists more interested in the prospect of explosive growth, if indeed it is so plausible?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best way to support the show. Thanks for listening!