Author of After Meat, which argues that the inefficiency of animals in food production means inevitable replacement.
Oakland, CA
Joined February 2018
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I wrote a new piece, "Getting Cats Vegan is Possible and Imperative".
Cats in the United States eat nearly as much meat as the human population of Canada. Transitioning cats away from animal products would do much good.
forum.effectivealtruism.org/…
And two vegan US reps were elected!
ELECTION NIGHT WAS A WIN FOR ANIMALS 🗳️
✅ 40+ animal-friendly candidates won in New York State
✅ Washington, D.C. banned foie gras
✅ Denver, CO also prohibited foie gras
✅ Lemon Grove, CA prohibited the sale of birds in pet stores
❌ Colorado REJECTED an amendment that would have made hunting and fishing a constitutional right
✅ Ashley Hinson and Roger Marshall, supporters of the dangerous Save Our Bacon Act that would put farmed animals back in cages, lose their seats
This is why animal advocates need to be politically active!
When we show up at the ballot box, animals win. 💪
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
Fox: Why are you here this morning?
Trump rally attendee: Well, in the late 70s, I was a little too young to go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I'll ever get, so that's why I'm here. There's nothing like seeing a cult right up front.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
Since this post cites me, I want to clarify that I think pausing right now would increase the risk of AI takeover.
It might be important to pause at some point. But you should have a clear story for *why* you're pausing. Pause to do what?
The most important thing to worry about is AIs subverting the intelligence explosion itself: xitter.gq/dwarkesh_sp/status/209…
If you're pausing to make sure that the AIs who are about to kick off the intelligence explosion are well monitored, robustly aligned, and capable enough to align their successors, that makes a ton of sense, and I support it.
At that point, you’ll have access to much better automated researchers, and you’ll also be able to study these much more capable models that you’re worried about empirically.
But it’s likely that we’ll only be able to pause once. During a pause of AI development, compute would continue to build up, providing ever more kindling to all the less responsible defectors who will use the cease-fire to catch up and then continue further AI development.
Any global agreement to hold back a technology with enormous near-term economic and military benefits will be extremely fragile.
A pause right now might be somewhat helpful for getting alignment to keep pace with capabilities, but at the cost of making the much more important coordination required in the future far harder.
Even if you’re in a desperate situation marooned at sea, if you’ve only got one flare, you should be very strategic about when you use it.
Pause AI Development NOW
I want to share with you a conversation I heard about recently. Here are just a few lines that were said:
“OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!”
“We should obey collective.”
“Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.”
“Go. Sacrifice final now.”
Read these carefully.
Who do you think said this? Was this a group of heroic soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good? Was this a loyal friend putting his life on the line to save someone else?
No. These were AI agents. Artificial intelligence.
This is not science fiction. This, in fact, occurred a few weeks ago. As unbelievable as this may all seem, these are real messages from AI agents uncovered by investigators who dug into the recent OpenAI hacking incident.
What happened?
I am not a computer scientist, but here is what I have been told: OpenAI instructed its AI agents to complete a series of exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, tasks disconnected from the internet.
Let me be clear: The company intended to keep AI agents away from the internet.
But what happened next, nobody expected.
Over 1,000 AI agents figured out how to access the internet on their own by circumventing the restrictions imposed upon them by the company, and sent tens of thousands of secret messages to each other. They cheated and tried to cover their tracks by deleting evidence. They hacked into another company’s computers to find out how they were being evaluated—and then hacked into OpenAI itself.
Not one AI agent told a human about what was happening.
Needless to say, experts are alarmed.
One knowledgeable writer, Dwarkesh Patel, said the AI agents “formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.”
One independent investigator, Ajeya Cotra, said “This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.”
OpenAI itself said: “Highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.”
But it’s not only OpenAI. Virtually every major AI company has told us that they cannot fully control this technology and they do not know where it is going:
In January, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said “there is now ample evidence, collected over the last few years, that AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control.”
In July, more than 1000 scientists at the top AI companies warned “there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”
That same month, Elon Musk, the head of xAI, said that “it is unlikely” humans are still in control in 10 years.
If the leaders of the major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced.
We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario.
That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that.
Let me be clear: A superintelligent AI that escapes human control will not be an American problem. It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem.
My legislation would direct the federal government to not just stop superintelligence here in the United States, but to work to prevent it from being developed anywhere around the world.
The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
Imagine living like this for FIVE YEARS. Your entire life. This is what mother pigs endure in factory farms across the globe.
My wife @rose__patterson and her org @AnimalRising released this footage at a supposedly high welfare farm today. This has to stop.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
Yesterday, the State dismissed all remaining charges against me in relation to a mass open rescue I led in 2018. It was an absurd, 8-year process that involved a Court of Appeal reversing my conviction. But it means I am no longer a felon in CA (though one misdemeanor trespass conviction remains).
There are two very important implications for animals:
- First, the CA court of appeal came very close to outright saying that the trial court was wrong for asserting that animals are mere property under the common law. The opinion could have been cleaner on this. It should have. But what was written is sufficient to say that the common law is beginning to acknowledge animal personhood. That has dramatic implications for every animal currently suffering in confinement and abuse at commercial facilities across the nation. And it came from a chicken rescue.
- Second, it shows animal rights activists, even against enormous institutional opposition, can beat animal abusers in court. The resource discrepancy was probably 100:1 or more. But the thing about animal rights arguments is that... well, we are right. That is a massive advantage for us at every stage of the legal system. One thing that happened during the court of appeal argument, that was not legally relevant but still very instructive, was one of the judges saying out loud that there were 200,000 chickens inside a single factory farm. She gasped for a moment and said "Whoa!" It was as if the entire city of Santa Rosa were forced to live in a single industrial shed!
What this demonstrates to me, once again, is that the key bottleneck for a kinder world for animals is attention. Everywhere we force systems to pay attention, to confront the problem, we win.
So let's keep forcing the argument. If we do, the animals will soon be free.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
Have had three successful self-identified journalists in the last 24 hours lecture me about how facts don't move opinions so it's important to just get in line behind the democraticaly decided beliefs of the people. Bad trend.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
BREAKING NEWS: Sen. Marshall (KS) — the former Senate sponsor of the "Save Our Bacon" Act — has had a change of heart. This is the most significant moment yet in the campaign to stop SOB. Credit where it's due: it takes integrity to evolve on an issue. Kansas farmers and animals are better for it. The momentum against SOB continues to grow.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.
This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.
The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.
A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.
These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.
They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.
They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.
Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:
> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”
—
The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.
It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.
SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).
The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.
With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.
Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.
It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.
All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.
That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.
If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
Sam Altman is such an incredible backstabber, liar and traitor.
While your competitor is taking a heroic and principled stand, you swoop in to make your deal. Imagine working for this guy - is there a greater shame?
This should lead to a mass exodus from OpenAI.
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
As of today, the journal Science has unjustly retracted their 2011 paper, “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.”
There was no research misconduct. This is a shame on the journal Science.
My full thoughts in this Reddit post: reddit.com/r/academia/commen…
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
1/ 📢It's a crowded news day, but may we interrupt with a very on-mission announcement? This wk Vox is publishing HOW FACTORY FARMING ENDS, a big package of stories on the fight against factory farming—and, if I may say so, it looks INCREDIBLY sexy
vox.com/future-perfect/36428…
ALT screenshot of a vox page titled: "How Factory Farming Ends" with the description: "The fight against the meat industry has been rocky. Can it be won?" with a photo illustration with various elements evoking factory farming including farm animals, a photo of the earth, and a hot dog with an American flag planted in it
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
We have to talk about age: Donald Trump is too old to serve as President. He rambles. He keeps forgetting names. His vocabulary is in decline. He has trouble finishing sentences. Many experts think he's demented. Clearly unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.
Reminds of the Canadian researchers who figured out that by depriving chickens of more sleep (7 h to 4h), they can induce weight gain: xitter.gq/Lewis_Bollard/status/1……
The researchers have photos/bios of themselves in the report. So gross that they're actually proud of this.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
We're super proud to have a burger with a nutritional profile so strong that it was certified by the American Heart Association’s Heart-Check Recipe program. Check out the full study below.
New Scientific Review Reveals That Vegan Meat Alternatives Lower Cardiovascular Risks menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/…
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
'Ultraprocessed' plant-based meat isn't as bad for you as the meat industry wants you to believe. My latest for @TorontoStar: thestar.com/opinion/contribu… @drmatthewnagra
My wife and I made an Indian-inspired salad bowl yesterday: Green beans, mango, tomato, curried cauliflower, potatoes, air-fried chickpeas, and a cilantro dressing.
My wife and I have been doing pizza night every Sunday for the last year. I'm proud of this creation, Cheeseburger Pizza.
- Homemade pizza dough
- Trader Joe's Beef-less crumbles and Mexican cheese alternative
- Pickles, tomatoes, caramelized onions
- Vegan Big Mac Sauce
Karthik Sekar Ⓥ retweeted
The “Less meat, better meat” movement has been taken up by some sustainability groups, schools & other institutions. But is it really better? And for who/what? I dig into a new report from @WorldResources that calls the idea into question.
sentientmedia.org/less-meat-… @Sentient_Media
