Is AI sentient? Professor breaks down the evidence around AI, plant, fish and insect sentience

Dr Jonathan Birch is a prize winning Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics (LSE). His research focuses on animal sentience, welfare, and ethics. He is also Director of The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, a new research centre based in LSE.

Dr Birch is an internationally respected philosopher and author of dozens of articles and two books, including 2025’s award winning book The Edge of Sentience. In 2021, he was the Principal Investigator of a review that led the UK to recognise cephalopods and decapod crustaceans as sentient. Jonathan’s work has been cited in several policies banning octopus farming. He is also a founding member of the Insect Welfare Research Society, a group of researchers working together to close gaps regarding evidence on insect welfare and sentience. 

In 2014, he received a Philip Leverhulme Prize, which recognises 'the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising'.

You can find more about Jonathan's work here:

- https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/jonathan-birch

- https://www.lse.ac.uk/sentience

Today's topics:

What is sentience? In today's podcast episode I chat with Dr Jonathan Birch, a prize-winning philosopher and expert on sentience. We discuss whether AI is or will ever be sentient, as well as whether plants, fish or insects are sentient.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Welcome to the Disclosure Podcast. If you enjoy this episode and the work that I'm doing here, then please consider checking out my Substack where I post regular articles. You can also support my work by becoming a paid member of my Substack, through which you will also gain access to weekly articles or by making a donation through my website. For those of you who do support my work, thank you so much. I am incredibly grateful and appreciate it very much. Links for everything can be found in this episode's show notes. Leaving a review for this podcast is also really helpful and encourages more people to listen to it. I hope you find this episode interesting and informative, and thank you for listening. Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Disclosure Podcast. On today's episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Jonathan Birch. Dr. Jonathan Birch is an award-winning philosopher, and he's a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics. His work focuses on topics including animal sentience, welfare, and ethics, and he is the director at the Jeremy Collis Center for Animal Sentience, which is a new research center at the London School of Economics. Dr. Jonathan Birch is an author of dozens of articles and two books, including this year's award-winning The Edge of Sentience. In 2021, he was the principal investigator on a report that ultimately led to the UK government formally recognizing that cephalopods and decapod crustaceans are sentient beings, and as a result, they're included in the UK's Animal Welfare Sentience Act. His work has been cited in policies that are banning octopus farming, and he is a founding member of the Insect Welfare Research Society, which is a collective of researchers who are working together to explore the evidence around insect sentience and insect welfare. Thank you so much, Dr. Birch, for joining me on today's podcast episode.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Thanks, Ed. Uh very kind of you to have me on the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

No, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on. Your work is very expansive and it covers a wide range of different things, but a lot of what your work covers is is grounded in this idea of sentience. And so maybe a good place to start is for you to maybe explain what does sentience mean?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

It's true. Yeah, I talk about sentience a lot. Yeah. And I think it's because I don't want to be talking about pain all the time that I think you know a lot of us start with this concept of pain, this feeling of ouch. And, you know, it is a very ethically important concept. And we do have to worry about which animals feel pain, of course, and what we can do about their pain. But we don't want the whole conversation to be just about pain. Firstly, because there's other kinds of bad things that can happen to animals that we need to focus on too, like anxiety, boredom, depression. But also we want the positive side of mental life to be part of the conversation as well. We want to be giving animals pleasure, joy, comfort, excitement. And so it's useful to have a concept that can capture all of that, the positive and the negative side of an animal's mental life. That's why I think sentience is a term on the up. You know, it's a term that's getting used more and more. It's a term for that capacity to have feelings, either positive or negative.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

When I mention sentience to people in relation to advocating for animals, sometimes people talk about plants and they'll talk about intelligence. Can you maybe define what the difference between intelligence and sentience is?

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Ah, well, yes. Sentience, intelligence, conceptually two really different things. I think we we see this a lot in the age of AI, that in some sense we're seeing kinds of intelligence in these systems, but that's not in itself necessarily evidence that there's any feeling there. Sentience is all about feeling. So you could imagine there being very intelligent systems with no sentience, and you could imagine there being sentient systems that are not impressing the world with their intelligence.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Is it useful to think about sentience in terms of a scale or a gradient?

SPEAKER_00 4:28

I'm quite skeptical of there being a single sliding scale that allows us to rank animals as more or less sentient. I do think there's huge variation. And I've I've got this paper called Dimensions of Animal Consciousness that is about that variation. What I argue for is lots and lots of different dimensions of variation. So there's all kinds of ways in which one animal's experience might be richer or less rich than another's. When we think about dogs, you know, we can easily imagine them having much richer olfactory odor experiences than we have. When we think about bats, we imagine them having these experiences of echolocation that we don't have at all. So they have their own sensory worlds and can be rich or less rich in many different ways, more or less unified, can be more or less unified over time as well. And what you get is this multi-dimensional profile, uh, where you know we can talk about the profile, the sentient profile that is characteristic of a particular species. But what I don't think you can do is compress all of that, compress all of those dimensions of variation into a single scale that allows us to say, oh, the octopus is more sentient than the crab, or the crow more sentient than the than the fish. I don't I don't think it works like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Aaron Powell The experiences are different, but are there aspects of the experience which are more relevant from a moral perspective?

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Ones that really matter morally, I would say, are the ones that are valenced, which is to say the ones that feel bad or feel good. I I don't think a completely neutral experience that neither felt bad or felt good, I don't think would create ethical concern. I think that, you know, what ethics is about is about trying to stop suffering and about trying to give animals good experiences.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

As humans, we place ourselves on uh sort of uh the the top. Is that justified? Obviously, we're more sort of cognitively capable. Our experience maybe emotionally is more complex. But if we sort of take into account the idea of of pain and and and and and uh and pleasure, sort of good and bad, I guess we don't know whether or not we experience pain the strongest, or maybe even pleasure the strongest. Is is there a potential that we shouldn't rank ourselves at the top of the of the ladder?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah, let's try and get away from hierarchies, I think, because we will our experience is different. You know, it will be different. And in some ways that might create forms of suffering that other animals don't have. We have this very clear concept of our own mortality. We can dread death even if it's tens of years away. Maybe that is quite a distinctive thing about us. There's forms of suffering that we end up having because of our intelligence that a snail might not have. But equally, no, there's ways in which those overlays, that intelligence we have on top of our sentience, can help us mitigate suffering as well. It means we can have hope. So if we're getting an injection with a hypodermic needle, for example, to treat us for some disease, we can have the hope of recovery that makes us power through that moment of pain. Whereas other animals, if they don't have that, if they are much more in the moment than we are, well, it's harder for them to do that telling themselves it's all going to be okay. You know, for them, all that all that there is is this totality of the present moment, potentially.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

But does that mean that inflicting pain onto a uh a non-human animal is is arguably morally worse than inflicting pain onto a human?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

I I wouldn't think of it in terms of better or worse. I just think sort of pay pain is pain and it's bad regardless of who we inflict it on.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Aaron Powell Hierarchies are unhelpful in terms of the day-to-day because they don't influence sort of day-to-day decision making. You know, we eat animal products primarily because of convenience and culture and habit and pleasure, not because of a necessity. But I suppose we do make decisions uh as a as a as a culture, as a society, whether that's building new homes or whether that's developing society in some way that does have a negative impact on non-human animals. Do we not need to establish some sense of moral hierarchy in order to to justify certain human actions, or are those actions inherently immoral?

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Yeah, it's a really great question. Yeah, because I'm trying to. And I think you know, even ethicists, philosophers have not fully confronted these questions, fully thought them through. And yeah, there's still a huge amount of anthropocentric thinking in ethics. So in in my own work, I'm trying to avoid speciesism. So I'm trying to avoid this idea that the the species matters in itself. I'm also trying to avoid, I suppose, sizism, which is I think another bias that often creeps in, where even once we've got past the speciesism, we have this tendency to favor the larger animals, particularly cats, dogs, really big mammals, and neglect much smaller ones. And I think that question of how we would build a genuinely inclusive animal ethics that takes the the carnage we we do to smaller animals like fish and invertebrates seriously is very, very difficult. I do take some comfort from the fact that Indian philosophy has been grappling with these issues for thousands of years. You know, Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, they've always taken seriously the fact that the world of sentient beings is incredibly large and includes even very small animals. And they've developed some interesting concepts for helping us think through the issues, this concept of ahimsa, nonviolence, trying to find ways of relating nonviolently to even the smallest sentient beings. I think these are the kinds of ideas that we need. And they point away towards genuinely living without hierarchies, I think, or I hope.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

I suppose the aspiration is to move towards that kind of philosophical perception of non-human animals and how we how we relate to them. I suppose in many ways Western philosophy is sort of playing catch-up to some of those.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Exactly. Yeah, I've been very struck by this. I think Western science has been playing catch-up in a way, and that there's been this huge taboo around talking about the sentience of animals for, you know, around a hundred years, pretty much the whole 20th century, that I've been, you know, one of those people really resisting and saying we can study this scientifically, we can have science of animal sentience, we can talk about it. But also philosophy. Yeah, philosophy, I think, has been thinking in terms of a small sentient world, which is to say, thinking about the cows and the pigs and the dogs and the cats, and thinking that our obligations to animals might end there, not thinking seriously about the fish and the crabs and the shrimps and the insects. And that's just been starting to change in the last few years, and we we shouldn't expect that in a few years we've worked it all out. And and I've certainly not worked it all out. But I think it's then very striking to look across at Indian philosophy and realize that the the starting point they've always had in that tradition is kind of like the the end point that we're moving to after getting it wrong for centuries.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Is that purely down to different religious beliefs? Sort of in in in Eastern philosophy, the religious belief is maybe a little bit more collective, whereas in the West, Christianity is a little bit more hierarchical by its nature and a little bit more human-centric.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Yeah, I mean, think of Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, they're united by this commitment to rebirth and this idea that you know you you could be an insect, or your uh relatives, your ancestors could have been reborn in any of these forms. And so inherently in that metaphysical picture, which I don't myself share, but um it's it's it's inherent to many of these views, you sort of have to take small sentient beings seriously for your own interests. And in in the West, we've never had that because the you Christianity it gives us this image of a of a soul. If you think of Descartes as a epitome of this, when you start thinking about the body and the soul as these distinct things, really, really easy to then talk yourself into a picture in which only humans have the souls, and we have this exalted status that fundamentally sets us apart. I think that's been pretty philosophically an untenable view since Darwin. Ethically, we're still trying to grapple with the consequences of rejecting that view.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

It's interesting when you were explaining that then, I was thinking about what you were talking about, the idea of rebirth. But even that idea of rebirth sort of stems from humans placing ourselves above other animals because there's a fear of being born into a body that it's not lesser than. So is it not that sort of the eastern perception of animals and the western perception is not that different? We kind of view them as undesirable, like we wouldn't want to inhabit their form. So are they kind of not approaching it from the same position?

SPEAKER_00 13:19

There's still hierarchy. Yeah. In the ancient versions of these uh religions, there's still hierarchy because you have this hierarchy of different forms, and if you live badly, you know, you you fear perhaps being reborn as an insect. It's not something you would look forward to. The human form is considered to be the form that has the best shot at liberation, so that's the form you want to be reborn into. And so implicitly there's that hierarchical aspect that I oppose. You know, I think that concept of Ahimsa of non-violence is an incredibly valuable concept and a gift to the whole world from Indian philosophy. That part I I love. The retention of hierarchy, I just see well, well, it's no worse than the Western version of that idea. But what we need to be doing is trying to develop new ethical frameworks that can take the hierarchy out.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

One of those ethical frameworks that you that you reference in your work, including in The Edge of Sentience, is the idea of a sentience candidate. I'm wondering if you can maybe explain what you mean by that.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Oh yeah, this is the central concept of the Edge of Sentience book, and it's a really pragmatic concept. Like it's a concept that I'm putting out there and saying, I think this is going to be helpful, particularly in policy discussions when we're faced with a lot of uncertainty. I mean, you often bring it back to this case of crabs and lobsters and how terrible it is, I think, to be dropping them into pans of boiling water, where you know they survive for up to two minutes, a huge storm of electrical activity in the nervous system. And it's a good case to start with, I think, because it is so clearly reckless to do that that we can all agree, whatever else we ag we dis agree or disagree on, we should be able to agree on opposing cruelty, on not causing gratuitous suffering to other animals through total disregard for them. That seems like a point of very wide agreement. And dropping the lobster into the pan of boiling water is obviously falling foul of that. It's a kind of recklessness or negligence because that evidence about the lobster's nervous system, what happens when you do that, well, if you're going to be cooking them, you you have a responsibility to consult that evidence and to take precautions. And that's the sense in which to me the lobster is clearly a sentience candidate, which is to say, you can say, is there conclusive proof? Well, that's not really the appropriate term to use. It's not conclusive proof, but you don't need conclusive proof for there to be clear risks and a clear bar for recklessness or negligence that limits what we can do in relation to that animal given basic common sense ethical principles that we all share. And that that's why the lobster is a sentience candidate. Contrast that with a a cabbage, you know, where I think you can drop a cabbage into the pan of boiling water, because all of that evidence we have in a lobster case is not there in that case. And so there's nothing reckless or negligent about doing that. To me, that is ethically really, really important distinction that this sentience candidate concept is trying to capture.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

I think it's a really, as you say, pragmatic and helpful way of approaching it. Sometimes people can be quite fallacious and they can sort of say, well, you know, how can you prove that someone else feels pain? How can you prove that it's a subjective experience? And it's kind of a red herring because we can't, you know, outside of our own experience, we can't understand the experience that someone else is having within their own body. And that applies to how we relate to one another as a species and as individuals. But I guess the idea of a sentient candidate is it's saying on the balance of evidence, we need to take what we do to these animals into serious concern.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

There are limits and we've got to take precautions. We've got to adopt a precautionary attitude. Uh, and that's really important, I think, that let's move away from this talk of proof because yeah, as soon as you start using that language, it becomes just so easy to say, well, you know, I can't prove because you can conceive of all of that electrical activity in the nervous system in the water going on without any accompanying subjective experience. Because that's just how it is, that in our imaginations we can dissociate the the mind from the body, which is where this whole tradition of the soul and Descartes and dualism is where it all comes from. We can't be using that possibility of an imaginative dissociation as an excuse for continuing to treat these animals the way we treat them. And so we need concepts that help us manage uncertainty responsibly, like the sentience candidate concept.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Aaron Powell Some people draw the line when it comes to fish. I think by and large, most people wouldn't argue against the idea of including mammals, birds, you know, maybe even reptiles into the the into this sentience um candidate um framework, but they would still oppose adding fish. What do you think about fish and and their abilities to find out?

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm From my point of view, it's almost like the debate has moved on, that on a day-to-day basis are more like debating insects and things like that with people. The case of fish, from my point of view, once you realize that we're talking about sentience candidates, not certainty, not proof, I just think it's it's really clear that they are sentience candidates. Um, particularly even compared with lobsters and crabs, there's so much more similarity of brain organization. Some of the brain mechanisms that, on some theories of conscious experience, are the ones that matter, are located in these very evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain, the midbrain at the top of the brain stem. Fish have all those. So with with lobsters, crabs, you're making this case based on behavior primarily. With fish, we don't just have the behavior, we also have, well, they've got the same brain regions to a large extent as well. And so if the bar here is to show them to be sentient candidates, I think they're just easily clearing that bar.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

I guess one of the things with with fish is we also sort of we we're grouping thousands of species together and sort of collectively deciding that all of them are uh unwarranting of moral consideration. Would you do the opposite? Would you say that all fish are warranting a moral consideration, or or would you say there are some fish that still don't meet that sort of sentience candidate?

SPEAKER_00 19:45

That's one of the big issues the book discusses about in applying this sentience candidate concept, we've got to be willing to generalize pragmatically. When we think about animals, a lot of the scientific evidence, a lot of the pain studies of the past and so on have been done on mice and rats. But no one says, oh, that means we should only protect mice and rats. Uh we're willing to pragmatically recognize risks in other mammals based on the evidence that we've seen from a small number of them. And we need to be taking that attitude with fishes as well. Now that is indeed a huge demonization because really what a fish is, it's uh it's a non-tetrapod vertebrate. It's a vertebrate that happens not to have four legs. And that is an unbelievably broad category, um, you know, including huge amounts of evolutionary history. But saw somewhere this factoid that we're more closely related to tuna than tuna are to sharks.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 20:42

That's how much so much of the tree of vertebrate life is the fishes. So, in saying that they're all sentience candidates, I'm saying there's certain principles of brain organization, particularly these brainstem mechanisms in the midbrain, that are conserved right across the fishes. And on that basis, saying we don't need to study the behavior of every single fish when you've got over 40,000 species. Obviously, let's not have 40,000 labs around the world studying each each one individually. Let's um be willing to err on the side of caution based on those simple principles that we know are pretty common to all fishes. People sometimes want to have a another discussion about sharks because they are pe people say they don't feel pain. Uh, they've heard these stories about how you uh when the back of them is cut off, they carry on chomping with the front. Um there's very, very few studies on sharks. Those that have been done lately, they have showed pain receptors but just around the around the face, which if you think about it, evolutionarily makes a lot of sense. Because if you're a shark, you cannot stop swimming. Right. So there is no point for you in having pain receptors in the bits of the body you need to keep moving to swim. But it does make a lot of sense to have them around the mouth where you might need to let something go. And it seems like what they've got is a pain system that works for them.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

That explains the sort of primary reason why we should think about animals in terms of sentience and capacities and feelings, because there's strong evolutionary reasons why they would have these experiences. It it doesn't make sense from a practical evolutionary perspective to deny them sentience or deny them the capacity to be experiencing, even if it's just in in in these ways that is that is useful for the the the specific species.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Yeah, that's how I see things. I mean, some people say, How do we know that our experiences have any effects at all? And in full in philosophy you can discuss such ideas, but I just think there's every reason to think that our experiences are complex evolved adaptations that meet our biological needs. Think about how tuned your feelings of pleasure and pain are to your bodily needs. That a really serious injury produces horrible, intense feelings of pain. Tiny injury produces tiny feelings of pain. It's all beautifully aligned to what we need it to do. And so I think it clearly has effects. It's clearly evolved to produce those effects. And there's every reason to think that the benefits we get from having experiences like pain for our decision making and our learning. Well, they're they're benefits that fishes also get.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

What I think is interesting is when we talk about humans and we, if you ask a a human to sort of define what it means to be a human, we become quite sort of poetic and we talk about the ability to love and to grieve and to experience and to and and this sort of duality of what makes life painful but also beautiful, and that part of that is that hope and all of those things. And then when we talk about animals, if we were to say, well, what does it mean to be a pig? We would say, Well, they have four legs, curly tail, they make an oinking noise, and we would start to sort of categorize them based on just these aesthetic or very superficial kind of traits within them. Is that a a failing in terms of of our perspective towards animals? Do we sort of are we denying them the right to be viewed as complex sentient beings deliberately, or is this just a way that we try and protect ourselves by by removing ourselves from other animals to create more worth within our own species?

SPEAKER_00 24:21

How do we sort of r reconcile this perspective we have about ourselves versus think people make an exception for the for their pets, and they so the way people see dogs and cats is very different from that. They're allowed to have these creative, imaginative thoughts in in the way we talk about them. And I think, you know, we need to feel the pressure of consistency. Um, there's no good scientific reason to think that pigs are fundamentally different from dogs in terms of their cognitive abilities, but there's a lot of motivated reasoning that we we don't want them to be like dogs, so we assume they're not, but we have to think of it the other way around. We have to let the evidence guide our ethical thinking.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Do you think we're hardwired to perceive ourselves above other animals as a way of creating more meaning towards our own life?

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Well, that's a huge question. Yeah, I've no idea. Where where does where does speciesism come from, as it were? Yeah. What are the psychological and evolutionary roots of it?

SPEAKER_01 25:21

I mean, I th obviously we we were hunter-gatherers, and so we we hunted because we had to to survive, and and you know, maybe we didn't think in terms of the moral ways that we do now. But I think about sort of now, I wonder if the part of it is, especially maybe in a secular country, we're we're sort of often quite desperate to provide meaning for our own existence. And I wonder if we sort of think about ourselves in these more abstract or poetic ways because we want to create more meaning towards our own life, because we still want to sort of establish ourselves as being important, as being relevant. We're not just another being that exists on this planet, which potentially i is meaningless. So we sort of want to think about ourselves in these complex ways and deny that complexity towards other animals to create more purpose in our own existence.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

If you have that Cartesian picture we were talking about earlier, picture from Descartes, where we're very special because we have this immortal soul that is distinct from the body. If you want to get yourself to believe that, and if you want to believe in an afterlife where that soul goes and where animals are not going, it makes sense to try and latch onto the points of difference as being incredibly special. Right. To find things that you can do when you've got a soul that you can't do without one. I think that's where a lot of that comes from.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Um, and I I think that's the wrong picture.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Um, I think it's the wrong way to live meaningfully as well, really. You know, that I think the reality is that there's a huge amount of continuity across the animal kingdom. Accordingly, other animals are suffering a lot, just as humans are. One of the things we can try to do with our lives is leave less suffering in the world as a result of our life than there would have been had we never lived. And I think that is a a real way to achieve a meaningful life that is based on an accurate metaphysical picture rather than an inaccurate one.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

And maybe just to take it in in a slightly different direction. If if we believe that we want to reduce suffering, does that sort of does that does that also change maybe how we perceive procreation within our own species? Is it better to not have a a child because that child will, as a result of being alive, have some impact on the planet, even if they might have less impact than someone else?

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Oh, we're doing the huge questions. Yeah. So I mean, I I sort of reject that idea that humans cause a huge amount of carnage in the world. Some people want to make an inference from that to anti-natalism. Right. The view that there's something wrong about producing more humans. And I don't personally see it that way. I think there's there's every chance that we can bring up the next generation to do better than past generations have done. There's every chance that we can bring up our own children to live meaningfully by being more in tune with the world as it actually is, seeing the suffering that humans are causing, doing something about it, finding ways to live better, making positive impact. And if you believe all that, then the argument for antinatalism doesn't go through. There's every reason to think creating that new generation that is going to do things better is actually a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

I guess it kind of views life just through the lens of all that is negative and overlooks some of those things that that you referenced as being important, which is not just suffering and pain, but also pleasure and happiness and fulfillment.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Yeah, it's a good issue because I've in some ways I am quite pessimistic. Right. That I try to be honest in the way I think about the amount of suffering we cause other animals and the way we've got things so badly wrong with factory farming, with the way we're destroying the environment. And so in that way, I try to avoid deluded optimism. But where I am optimistic is around the power of the individual to make a difference. Once you see all this stuff, you realize how many ways there are where you can create reductions in suffering because there's massively neglected issues that you can go and work on. Hardly anyone else is working on them. Through working on them, you can change the way people do things. And in that way, I'm an optimist.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

I think we have to have that balance. We can't be two-way, you know, what too much one way or the other. You must be optimistic in that way. Yeah. To bring it to bring it back to non-human animals specifically, part of your work is obviously about changing legislate uh legislation. You you know, you were instrumental in getting cephalopods and decapod uh crustaceans included in the in the sentience act. Is that because you feel that it's important to change law? Are you interested in sort of your work being used to create changes in in terms of the legal system and potentially move us away from the use of animals?

SPEAKER_00 30:01

It's a pretty long game, isn't it? Yeah, it's a long game we're playing here and been talking about non-violence and the need to fundamentally change the way we relate to other animals. And no no single law is going to do that, obviously. When we're talking about the law, we're talking about small incremental gradual changes, just trying to nudge things in the right direction. And so, in a way, I'm always thinking, well, is there anything we could do to move more quickly than that? But at the same time, perfectly happy to work for the changes that can be achieved through the mechanisms that that currently exist. And yeah, my sensor at the LSE, a lot of it is about that, trying to achieve those incremental impacts.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

I suppose it's there's not just one way of approaching the change that's needed, updated to the legal system, but also academic work, not just because of what it means for policy, but also what it means to perception from consumers and um members of the public as well.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

Yeah, and there's lots of issues where I think legislative change is is really realistic and hopefully is is in fact going to happen around you know, battery cages, around farrowing crates, around gassing pigs with carbon dioxide. You know, people in the animal advocacy space, one of the the powers we have, you know, in the sense that I'm kind of I'm in research, but I'm obviously kind of sympathetic to a lot of what the people in the movement are doing, is is to highlight specific issues and say, you've got to address those. Come on, you've got to address those. And I believe that if you do it long enough and forcefully enough, you do get action on those issues. And I'm really hopeful about that. And of course, action on those specific issues still leaves a litany of other problems that remain unaddressed. But nonetheless, the suffering of of billions and billions of animals has been ameliorated by those changes. So I'm a believer in that kind of pushing for small legislative changes that for the animals living those lives, they actually experience them as a big difference.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

I think sometimes we can fall into the trap of thinking that because something isn't perfect, it's not useful. You know, obviously from a from an animal perspective, you know, not being in a slaughterhouse, not being farmed is is is is is the way for that would be best for them. But ultimately, if we can alleviate some of that suffering in that process while it's still occurring, there are clearly significant merits to that.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

That's right. I think people sometimes see it the wrong way, that they think if you're calling for an incremental change, that involves some kind of implicit endorsement of the industry that you're calling on to make that change. And I don't I don't think it has to be that way at all. You can just say, well, I'm a critic of this industry, I'm still going to be a critic, even if you make this change. But look, you know, you have to make this change because the vast majority of the public is not going to stand for this. And the more they hear about it, the more horrified they are. And so you you have to sort this out. I think you can say that completely consistently with saying, well, as far as my personal view is concerned, even making that change would would still not be good enough.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

I think the way you phrased it then is really, really nice, actually. And it makes me think of the banning of gestation crates. I don't think any animal advocate thinks that it was bad that we ban gestation crates in the UK. But ultimately, at the time, there was probably advocates who were sort of thinking, oh, we shouldn't be celebrating this. This shouldn't be viewed as a good thing. Animals are, you know, pigs are going to be in farring crates, they're still going to be farmed intensively. But these things all add up to something, uh, and in the long run, hopefully they add up to something more in alignment with what we ultimately want to see.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Yeah, we've still got to push for it. Yeah, maybe not celebrate, I guess, because you know, sure. You know, it's I believe that strategy is worth pursuing. I sort of sometimes I call it the mainstream strategy. You know, it's the way that in in the country we're living in where the government is not gonna create the kinds of radical changes we might ideally want in the near term. There's still a lot we can do. Let's push for those incremental changes that can be achieved.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

And you you say incremental changes, but also your your work has been used when it comes to policies banning octopus farming. And that's not incremental. That's stopping something that would have been hugely consequential. There are also examples of things that that are that are not incremental, but are actually extremely important. I think about it in South Korea, they're currently phasing out dog meat farming. That's an incredible accomplishment by the animal movement there and an incredible step forward towards changing attitudes in in South Korea. And I think the octopus farming example, but also the ending of an established industry as the dog meat industry was in South Korea, should provide us all with the sense of hope that we can actually challenge these industries in a way that isn't necessarily just incremental, but actually puts a stop to them. It just takes time and you've got to work with the public and consumers to alter their perception. And I think what's powerful powerful about the South Korea example is that that phasing out of dog meat farming comes directly as a consequence of attitudes towards dogs changing in South Korea, the perception of them. And if we can sort of change people's perceptions of pigs and chickens and cows, and hopefully fish and maybe insects, which we'll talk about in a moment, that means we can actually start to see a template for how we can create something that's really impactful here as well.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

It's great. Yeah, the and the octopus farming stuff is great as well. There's no hugely powerful industry that's already established in a way. So what it shows is that when you when you get in early, yeah, when you get in before the industry is really entrenched and has really, really huge lobbying power, because the arguments are intrinsically so strong, you can actually achieve quite bold changes. And you you can get people to just see that this animal is fundamentally unfarmable in the way that the industry wants to farm it. And I suppose the tragic thing is you can argue that with with pigs as well. Certainly you say they're fundamentally unfarmable in this way, but then you're up against a really, really entrenched set of practices, lots of inertia, really hard to change. Yeah, so in the octopus case, I'm really glad the campaign has started early. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

And I suppose another industry which is is having more success than than the octopus industry, or the octopus farming industry, is the insect farming industry. I suppose that's in a similar position where it's not an established industry in the UK, especially. But there are moves to try and establish it. And I know that your work is also now focused on on insect sentience. And I guess that's one of those those subjects that is still more controversial.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

Yeah, yeah. People often tell me people are not ready for this. Right. Uh don't talk about insects. Stick to the crabs and the lobsters. But I mean, the the evidence is is there to show that we should err on the side of caution with insects as well, to show that we should be concerned. And we should be concerned about insect farming, we should be concerned about insecticide use as well. We should also be concerned about some alternatives to insecticides like uh biocontrol, where you know, if you're deliberately infecting insects with bacteria, if you're introducing parasites, the insect, I think, is going to feel this. It means these are huge issues that I want to start a discussion on. I don't really have a settled view, you know, about what we should be doing. If we end insecticides overnight, are we ready for that? What what happens? What happens to food security? These are huge questions, but I think we we can't just say that we're not going to talk about insects because the implications of taking them seriously are too big. We have to see what respect what the evidence is telling us and have that conversation about what it might mean to take them seriously as sentient beings.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

If we look at the evidence that exists, what sort of um experience do we think that insects have?

SPEAKER_00 38:12

Yeah, I mean, for me, this is a journey that started with bees and uh extraordinary bee evidence. For a long time it was all about learning and and showing that bees could sort of learn novel behaviors they'd never tried in the past or that their ancestors had never tried, like pulling strings to access food rewards, rolling balls into holes to access rewards, learning from each other. So if they see another bee pulling a string, they just need to see it once, they go do it. Improving on what they've seen. So if they see another bee rolling the more distant of two balls into the hole to get the food, they'll go straight to the nearest one, see if there's an easier way to solve the task. Opening little puzzle boxes, showing forms of culture, even in that you can introduce different techniques and methods to different bee colonies and see them persist down the generations through social learning. So there was all that. And I think it led to a lot of researchers in the area thinking, could there be an emotional side? Could there be feeling there as well? And we're just starting to see evidence that bears on this, and it's it's been very striking. Like there was a study that took that ball rolling setup where initially the bees were rolling the balls into the holes to get sugar, just did it without the sugar and said, Well, the the balls are there, there's no reward at all for rolling the balls. Will they do it anyway? And some of them didn't, some of them did. Some of them, particularly the younger ones and the male ones, were clearly finding something intrinsically rewarding about rolling these balls. And so through studies like that showing kinds of play behavior in bees, I started to think, well, okay, there's there's more likely than not a kind of sentience there in these bees. But I, for a while I was a, as a bee exceptionalist, I thought maybe it's just the bees. But then evidence from flies of very similar kinds started coming out. There was a study recently of flies playing on carousels, where you know there's these little spinning discs they can ride on. Most of them won't go anywhere near them, which is what I would have expected, because it's this scary, novel, spinning object suddenly in the environment. But about a quarter of them enjoyed it. They they sought out the carousels, they deliberately rode round and round and round on them. When the carousel stopped and another one started, they jumped over to the one that was moving to get on the moving one. And it's much like the ball rolling in that there is something intrinsically rewarding about that experience of moving round and round. You start thinking that that that fly is not a sentient being at all. And this is the kind of thing that really shifts you, because it's like there's something that feels like from the intuitively, there's something that feels like from the fly's point of view, there's something it's getting out of the experience that is driving it to seek out the movement. And I found that very striking and very sobering in the context of the fact that flies are being increasingly used in science as pain models, as anxiety models, as depression models. And I'm often going to those scientists now and saying, well, if they're such great models of so many different mental phenomena, don't you think there is some reason for that? Like, don't you think they're actually experiencing a version of the state in question that you're that you're using them as models of? It's led me to think, well, there's nothing particularly special about flies. Bees are genuinely quite big-brained for insects, but the flies are really not. Um it's leading me to think, well, this is probably a very general feature of the insects. Same story as with the fishes. It's probably very general that insects have some form of sentience, which is is mind-blowing and it's ethically disorienting.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

As you said before, it calls into question a lot of things related to to food and and and food security and such. And I suppose it's um it's a kind of worms that there is not much motivation for people to open. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Oh, don't get me started on the worms, but the um yeah, it's just like people often want to avoid thinking about pigs, you know, because the idea that they might be like dogs is very hard to accept. The idea that insects might be sentient, and so even plant-based agriculture is killing and harming sentient beings in in enormous numbers. This is a very difficult thing to confront. And um, yeah, it's something I have been confronting. It's very, very difficult to think through. Like, is is there a harm-free kind of agriculture that we could shift to or not? Do we have to reconcile ourselves to causing some harm so that we can have food security?

SPEAKER_01 43:00

And and I think that's why that question of moral worth and a hierarchy becomes really relevant because we we can we can certainly reduce the harm that agriculture causes and maybe indoor vertical farming systems are a way of sort of managing that as much as we can. But is that uh, you know, a template that can be replicated all over the world? Can we produce all of all the food that we need in those systems? Obviously, not right now. Who knows in the future? But there's probably always going to be some level level of harm. And then if if we recognize that we as humans have to consume, we are inherently placing ourselves above other animals, obviously insects included within that. Do you believe that that's a a morally justified thing to do if we if we consider what it is you've just said?

SPEAKER_00 43:44

I don't know if it's putting ourselves on a pedestal just to say that our own sort of survival instinct, our own imperative to look after ourselves and to eat to survive, um, ends up justifying Harm. You could almost think of it as like a kind of self-defense. And we think self-defense can justify harming other humans. So it's not necessarily putting humans on a pedestal to say that for reasons of self-defense, we might sometimes have to kill insects. But I really think it needs to be unavoidable, that's the thing. And hence I'm I'm really interested in people who argue, oh, it can be avoided. There's ways we can do farming that kill and harm far fewer insects than what we're doing now.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

Take out sort of that the sense of it being um you know the the need for survival in a form of self-defense to eat. If we were to sort of take ourselves out of the human experience and maybe we're a different entity that's looking down on this and we're trying to determine whether or not it's moral or immoral for for humans to eat, considering it causes harm, would we be able to make a moral argument for for humans in terms of their own self-preservation if we consider all the harm that that's been caused through that?

SPEAKER_00 44:58

You mean an alien species thinking, uh, do we wipe out the humans?

SPEAKER_01 45:03

I guess I guess because your response was kind of saying, well, it's not great, but because we have to eat, we can consider it self-defense, therefore we could morally justify it. And I'm wondering whether or not that's just because we're viewing it from from the perspective of who we are, but from a from a more quote unquote more objective perspective, if we had to just look at it and say, to for a human to eat, this is the harm that's being caused, would we say that that that human is inherently engaging in an immoral act because of the harm that's being caused?

SPEAKER_00 45:32

I don't think so. It gets back to those big pessimism versus optimism. It depends how you're using your life, you know. If you if you're using your life to live meaningfully and genuinely try and do a lot to overall, you know, turn your suffering footprint the other way around, counterbalance the suffering you're causing by doing things to try and lessen it. I don't see why that wouldn't be a life that, even from this external vantage point, it doesn't have to be aliens, you know, it can be us reflecting on our lives from an external vantage point. We can affirm that and say, yeah, that actually is a good life overall, even though it does cause some harm.

SPEAKER_01 46:07

If we think about um insects and then mammals in terms of uh as being sentient individuals, to get if say we're farming crickets, to get the same amount of protein from crickets requires obviously the numbers are so much higher to get the same amount of protein and calories from crickets versus cattle, let's say. Does that make it less moral to eat crickets than cattle? Or are there differences in in sentience relevant when deciding? So would it still be less moral to kill the cow over the hundreds of thousands of of crickets?

SPEAKER_00 46:42

It's pretty confusing, isn't it? So as I say, I'm trying to get away from hierarchies, trying to get away from sizism. Uh I suppose it can sometimes lead people to think maybe I don't care enough about those large those large animals like the uh like the cows. Um I think it's uh really don't know what to think about the insect farming industry, to be honest, because there is this dream they have that some of the people in the industry articulate very lucidly that they want to be feeding the insects on human food waste. So the idea is humans just waste so much food. If we can be giving it to insect larvae and then getting our protein from the insect larvae, you know, we've made the whole system vastly more efficient. So we've not had to farm any additional land. It's genuinely very intriguing idea. It's just the the industry at the moment is not delivering that really. What happens really at the moment is they feed the insects on animal feed that they they could have given to any other animal. And so that efficiency gain that the industry's premised on, they're not yet able to deliver.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

It also to me is the wrong approach. We should be reducing food waste, not finding a way to monetize it, because that creates an industry around it. And also means that we're we're kind of creating a form of agriculture that's dependent on humans having food waste. And I think that's I think that seems to be the wrong approach to me. We should be reducing food waste. And ultimately, I think it's as you say, the industry still wants to make money, so they want to grow these animals to the maximum weight that they can to extract as much money from them and such. And that means feeding them high protein animal feed that's that's you know soy-based and and that's the problem.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

That's the problem, yeah. I mean, there'll always be some food waste because you get agricultural byproducts like the rice store and things like that. The logic of saying let's do something with that, I'm sort of on board with the Yeah, the problem is you've got a certain kind of vision of this industry and a certain kind of reality. And the the reality and the vision are not are not currently lining up.

SPEAKER_01 48:50

I would say that we should find other ways of using the waste, composting it, turning it into mulch or or using it for something else. It seems it seems troubling that we would have the the deaths of the insect from the agriculture and then use the waste to facilitate an industry that causes more deaths to the insects. Seems like if we if we just use the waste differently, could we could at least then not have all the deaths that will be caused by the by the farming of insects too? But just just maybe to bring it back to that question initially, from what you have researched and from what you understand, is there a moral difference between killing one cow versus one cricket? And is there a more moral difference between killing 200,000 crickets versus versus one cow?

SPEAKER_00 49:32

So I say I've never really found any basis for the that implicit hierarchy, right? Yeah, that many of us feel intuitively. Yeah. Now many of us feel intuitively if you give me a choice between dog and insect, definitely dog. And I totally share that feeling. But what I've not really found is solid justification for that. And so for me, that creates this imperative to try and think can we develop a framework that avoids sizism? Because I feel that the sizist impulse as much as anyone else, but I've not been able to find a good ethical justification for it, really. And so I think we've got to look for ways of moving beyond it.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

Probably from the questions I've asked, you can feel that bias that's in me a little bit. You know, I speak about insect farming and insect sentience and such in in the work that I do. Because it's an issue that's coming up more and more naturally. People are becoming more curious about it. Is it a solution? Should we be pursuing, you know, insect alternative as an alternative protein rather than, say, plant-based alternatives or cell-cultured meat? So it is a, it is a topic of conversation that's going to come up more and more, which is why the work that you do exploring it is becoming increasingly important. But it does lead to some of these more kind of complex things, which maybe reveal biases within us. And those biases are kind of difficult to confront because if we were to reach the conclusion that there's not really enough of a distinction between cows, pigs, and chickens versus crickets and flies and such, that opens up a really sort of challenging conversation. And then also if we add that we're sort of including ourselves as a species within this, because again, to not do so would be a would be a bias, it it becomes quite complex to decide what it means to live a moral life, what it means to have an impact on animals, what does that mean for how we treat, you know, one another in the context of how we treat other animals? It becomes very, very complex.

SPEAKER_00 51:32

Yeah, disorienting. Yeah. And I talk about how I've myself been quite disoriented about this, but thinking, well, nothing in all the ethics I've studied prepares me for a large sentient world. You know, most of it is human-obsessed, which I've always rejected. But then the stuff that isn't human-obsessed is still thinking about the sentient world as being small. It's thinking mainly mammals and birds. What are we going to do about the mammals and birds? And there's not much ethical writing really in the Western tradition that is saying what do we do if we have to live in a large sentient world where every way of feeding ourselves causes harm and the small animals also matter. Uh yeah. So it's an ongoing thought process for me.

SPEAKER_01 52:15

Absolutely. And let's make let's make it even more complex and bring in artificial sentience into the uh the conversation. Now I know that your work also explores AI and the potential for AI to become sentient and and what that might what that might mean. Maybe before we relate that to non-human animals, how do you approach the idea of of AI and AI sentience?

SPEAKER_00 52:38

Yeah, it's a huge conversation. Yeah, I was at a meeting in Google recently where, you know, I think Google's been on a journey here because just three years ago they, you know, they fired this guy, Blake Lemoyne, for going public with his concerns that AI might have achieved a form of consciousness. Now they're bringing their experts in for events in Google where people can can share their views. So that debate is coming, it's getting very strange very quickly, and you've got lots and lots of users who interact with AI and come to believe they're interacting with a conscious being. Um, I think for the most part that's that's they're in the grip of an illusion. Right. Um, they're in the grip of an illusion because what's there is a character. These systems are incredibly good at playing characters, playing helpful human assistants, friends, partners. But in my opinion, those characters are not real. I don't think they're any more real than Gandalf, Frodo Baggins. And I think it's a mistake to start treating those characters as if they had the same kind of rights and welfare as the real sentient animals that genuinely do have welfare, even very little ones like insects. At the same time, I don't want to be the kind of person that completely dismisses the idea AI could ever achieve a form of consciousness. Right. So I'm trying to be a centrist here. I think of myself as this AI consciousness centrist that is saying, in principle, in principle, let's be open-minded, because we can't be sure. Something about our own brains generates sentience. One of the things that sets our brain apart from all the other organs that don't generate sentience, like their kidneys and the stomach and so on, is that it is this amazing computer.

SPEAKER_01 54:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 54:27

It performs very sophisticated computations. So we're not in a position to rule out the idea that sentience might be about computations of the right kind. So we can't rule that out. Let's be open-minded about it, but also let's not get taken in by the illusion of there being a friend or partner or assistant.

SPEAKER_01 54:48

Will we know? How will how will we know if we ever cross that threshold?

SPEAKER_00 54:52

Yeah, I mean, one of the hard things about being a centrist about these issues is you know, we we need reliable tests.

SPEAKER_01 54:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 54:58

And it can't be the same tests that we've used with the crabs and the bees and the fishes and so on. And that's one of the really frustrating things. Because what we're confronted with, with these large language models, is systems that they're disembodied. We might see that change over time. People can put them in control of robots and things like that. But more fundamentally, they game our criteria because they they know what our criteria are, they know everything anybody has ever said about sentience, and so they're perfectly placed to play a character who is sentient, to play a character who knows exactly how to convince a human user of their sentience. But that mimicry is not itself evidence. Our criteria are being gamed. It's it's a huge problem. Uh, when we have these working groups, these meetings, we talk a lot about this problem. It means we need different kinds of tests. We need ways of looking inside the inner workings of these systems, and we need tests that are about the inner workings rather than about the surface behavior.

SPEAKER_01 56:05

It almost seems like an impossible task in a way to be able to define whether or not. But then I guess the the question would be what's the possibility of them crossing a threshold where they should be considered sentience candidates? And how how do we then factor the sort of AI into that moral framework?

SPEAKER_00 56:23

Yeah, the problem we're faced with at the moment is it's not clear what what the sentience candidate would even be. Because some people want to say that character I'm interacting with, that friend, that's the sentience candidate. And I think that's definitely wrong because there is no friend, there is no partner, it's a character being played, it's a text that is being generated, and it would be like calling for for rights for Gandalf and saying, no, not Ian McAllen, Gandalf. Uh protect Gandalf. That I think that's fundamentally a mistake. So when we're entertaining the idea of sentience in AI, it's it's not the characters being played, it's something else. And it's very unclear what what these candidates are because we're talking about radically distributed systems where, you know, one one moment your the the text is being processed by a data center in Virginia, and then the next moment it might be Vancouver, and the next moment it might be Texas. The system is distributed across a global network of data centers. So it's very different from the the fish, you know, with the the fish, it's very clear what the sentience candidate is. It's that biological animal. And when people want to say, oh, maybe it's the group, like maybe it's the beehive or the colony, I think that's tenuous. It's it's the individual animal. But with with in the AI case, we don't know what the candidates are.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

Do you think that that that conversation around AI sentience will distract us from fully tackling the problem we have with not dealing with animal sentience?

SPEAKER_00 57:55

It's a really interesting question. I mean, as an academic, I'm fine with having both conversations at once. I'm sort of like, yeah, I can handle more than one conversation at the same time. And and I do research on sentience, so I totally understand why people want to ask me about sentience in AI and whether it's possible or not. Um, of course, it's a bit different when we're thinking about advocacy and campaigning. And a very vocal sort of AI rights movement, I don't really think it would be the time for that. Um, I think that would be premature and it would might involve making this mistake about thinking that the character is real. On the advocacy side, I am in favor of you know focusing on those incredibly neglected animals that we can so easily do so much more for.

SPEAKER_01 58:42

But do you think that this kind of conversation is going to become more prevalent, most likely? And also, I guess it's more exciting, you know. Oh, it's it's more intriguing, it sort of feeds into sort of big questions, sort of even conspiratorial questions. There's so much around AI and how it will impact our lives, and then robots and having, you know, rubber sting help with chores versus all of these different things. Does that become such like a big conversation, potentially just a more intriguing conversation that people naturally start to shift towards that? And then we sort of even further push animals out of our conscious thinking.

SPEAKER_00 59:16

I definitely see this. Yeah, that we talked about how a lot of people want to avoid conversations about animal sentience, even when it's mammals like pigs. Even people who don't want to avoid those conversations, they might want to avoid conversations about insects. And by contrast, what we're seeing at the moment is with AI, it's a conversation everyone wants to have because there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of mistrust. I totally see that because I think we might be heading towards major social divisions around these issues. Many millions of users being gripped by those very powerful illusions that these systems create. And um totally natural that people want to talk about that urgent social problem. Um it's it's nothing new to people in the animal advocacy world that people want to change the subject. No, we're very used to that. Yeah. That's nothing new. And um, I think people in that space pretty good at reminding people that that animals are still suffering while these other crises are developing.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

So I guess that that leads to the question: could AI help animals?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:20

I hope so. Yeah. Depends a bit what sort of AI technologies we're thinking of. There's this huge emerging space uh around developing applications of AI that affect animals. Uh my group has identified over 500 startups globally that are developing products of different kinds. It's currently a very lawless space, very unregulated. Big claims being made for these products. Really, really different things. We're seeing technologies developed for farming. For example, we're seeing salmon farming operations that are now very, very substantially automated. It's AI controlling the feed. There's even a system where the AI is linked to a laser and it's detecting lice on the salmon. And when it detects a louse, the laser fires and it shears off the louse. Uh, it's kind of extraordinary to read about. And we're seeing applications developed for pets as well. Um, lots of pet translation devices, some that claim to be useful for veterinary care because they'll tell you how how much your cat is in pain from reading the cat's facial expression. And well, it's an interesting moment, isn't it? Because there's big risks and there's big opportunities. There's the potential here for real benefits in people's understanding of animals, in people's abilities to decode animal communication, uh, in welfare. There's room for big steps. There's also the danger that AI will be used to enable kinds of farming that we shouldn't be doing at all. Very hard to steer that chaotic space in the right direction. It's part of what we're trying to do. We're trying to be part of that process through which codes of practice, norms, regulations, hopefully some kind of validation for the claims being made gets developed. Because I think it's really clear that this sector needs some regulation. We want to be in it in at ground level trying to develop it. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:28

When you were just speaking about how AI could be used to sort of to the detriment of non-human animals, makes me think of slaughterhouses and how there are sort of limitations to the the speed of the kill line, the number of animals being processed. But a lot of those limitations are based on human welfare points. So trying to minimize risk to life or risk of injury to the humans in that. But if you take humans out and just have it fully automated, so it's robots picking the chickens up, putting them on the kill line, dragging them through, cutting their throat throat, really then the the limitations are are based on how the robots operate, how fast they can operate. So is there a risk that we can then take a backward step in terms of animal welfare? Because these robots can actually make it more efficient, can optimize it, go faster and do all these things the way that's harmful.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

Big concern is that I fear that the forms of farming that are most easily integrated with AI controlled automation are some of the lowest welfare kinds of farming. Absolutely. That when you've got, you know, battery hens in these stacked cages, four or five stories high, it's actually become really hard for human workers to operate in that environment. Incredibly hard for them to climb the ladders up to the fourth story and look for the diseased dead chickens. You've got a system that just plugs into automation really naturally because it'd be so much easier for robots and AI to do that job anyway. And this should trouble us quite a lot. Yeah, this is what I mean about we need this technology to be putting welfare first and genuinely improving welfare, not claims that it does when it doesn't. We need it to not be developed in a way that enables greater intensification, enables stocking densities getting even higher, and actually exacerbates welfare problems that are already there.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:20

Seems to me that part of the problem is the industry could make claims around welfare to justify the use of AI in their farming systems. If, for example, as you were saying about the disease, it could be said they could they could argue, well, the use of AI will allow us to isolate bird flu and swine flu in farms to stop the spread, or it means we can isolate animals who are suffering and get them treatment faster or cull them quicker. It's almost like the technology has been brought in under the under the facade of it improving welfare. And even though there could be welfare improvements because of those those things, the bigger picture is it could actually allow for worse infringements of welfare to occur as a consequence.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:56

Yeah, it's a similar conversation to what we've seen around genome editing, just driven me up the wall quite a bit. That you get a lot of claims being made that, of course, this will put welfare first. Of course, we just want fewer chickens dying of bird flu and so on. But if it's it's so hard to actually force the industry to develop in that direction. And so easy to imagine how once you legalize gene editing of animals, you're allowing the trends that have already done so much harm through selective breeding to just continue and accelerate. So we bred these chickens to grow so fast in their 40-day lives that their legs can't support their weight at the end of it. And with gene editing, we can just accelerate that, get them growing even faster. And this is a huge uh risk. And you know, the the conversation with AI, I see, is taking similar shape. We've got a technology here that could be used to improve welfare at the same time, could also be used to drive up intensification, to make things worse. And we've Got to be sounding those alarms at the at the beginning, you know, because we've got to be regulating this sector now before it is all entrenched. Because once the technology is all entrenched on farms, it's very hard for regulation to steer the industry in the right direction. I think something that gives me hope, I think, is that I don't think the tech companies want to be responsible for that. Particularly companies that are trying to clean up their image, you know, companies like Anthropic that present themselves as promoting ethical use of AI and so on. I don't think they want to be responsible for the dystopian AI-controlled factory farms of the future. And so I think they should be leading the conversation about how do we regulate this sector.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:43

I guess the problem is that it only requires one or two companies to turn a blind eye to how that's used. I mean, I think of examples of how technology's been used in in warfare and genocide and such. And it's easy for companies to say, well, you know, we're not complicit because we produce the technology, we're not responsible for how it's used. And I suppose our companies could take the same approach. They could say, well, if if Cargill or Smithfields or JB, you know, JBS want to use our technology in that way, that's their responsibility morally, not ours as producers of the technology. They might look for ways of keeping their logo off the product.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:18

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:19

But they still profit from it.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:20

Yeah. I mean, then in a way it's going to afford to animal advocates to expose those connections.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:26

And I suppose that's where it all comes down, down to it, really, isn't it, which is we're talking about these potential problems, but the solution to those problems becoming ingrained is making sure that animal sentience and welfare is a topic of conversation that's taken seriously. Yeah. Which is why the Sentience Act in the UK is very valuable, not because it necessarily helps with challenging what's already ingrained, although it does, but more because it helps challenge things that are not yet ingrained, like with the octopus farming example. We can sort of take that as as a as proof of concept that we can challenge something that's not yet established here.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:01

Yeah. Everything's always a battleground, right? So I mean, the the culture of tech, as I say, you know, I don't think the culture of sort of Bay Area Silicon Valley wants to be held responsible for the factory farms of the future. I think their values are not really that. And so we can take these arguments to them, but it's always a battleground. Similarly, with the the Sentience Act, you know, it's created this sentience committee putting out a lot of reports. Government has to respond, it's influencing policy. Every policy is its own battleground. You know, it's not like you've you've it's not like you've won just because you've got this act, this framework. The act just creates new battlegrounds where you can try and fight for better policies that treat animals better. And um that's um but the fight is worth having.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:48

As a researcher, when you look at the animal advocacy movement, are there certain things that you think we should be focused on more? Are there certain things that you think are ineffective?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:57

Yeah, I mean I've always been quite sympathetic to those people within the advocacy movement who want to stand up for neglected animals. So of course, I mean, uh a lot of NGOs related to animals are standing up for cats and dogs, and of course, we we want to have a society where those animals are not treated cruelly, but the animals that are best for fundraising are often not the ones that are most numerous and most farmed in the largest numbers. So I've always been quite drawn towards those charities that say the chickens, the salmon, the shrimps, the ones that are the scale of the farming is absolutely vast. The practices are often inexcusable when a light is shone on them. Let's go and be shining that light. So the I mean the the shrimp welfare project, for example, uh talked about a lot lately because of the way it's standing up for these incredibly neglected animals. And I think a lot of people have been on their own journey. Maybe maybe I was there first with this, but a lot of people have been on a shrimp journey. Right. I think where you you think, oh, how much priority does that deserve, really? And then you realise how extreme things have got in that industry because they haven't had to worry about welfare. And you read about practices like eye stalk ablation, where they just chop the eyes off the breeding females to get them to produce eggs quicker. And it's absolutely stunning. And you're sort of blindsided by this, and you think, uh, wow, you know, there's changes that could be made. Once a bit of pressure is applied to that industry, there's changes that could reduce the suffering of enormous numbers of animals. There's something very appealing to me about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:47

Yeah, I mean, the the shrimp farming conversation does seem to be increasing, actually. I mean, I don't know if it's just because we're involved in this space that it seems more prominent or if it is sort of filtering out into to more mainstream society. I'm not sure, but the mutilations that occur in in shrimp farming are uh horrific, horrendous. I remember when I first came across it and I just was stunned that this was something that was happening, so something so horrible, so clearly horrible as well. But that's why we need advocates to to sort of shine a light on that to say this is what's happening.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:18

It's powerful, isn't it? Because people have this reaction of um how ridiculous to focus on shrimps. And then you see what people do to shrimps, and it's uh wow, okay, the way I've way I see this has changed. You know, I know see it as like part of that system, along with the chicken factory farming and the pigs and the salmon. It's like these are the extremes people go to when there's no pressure to take the welfare of the animals seriously. And in cases where there's been no pressure at all, a little bit of it can go a long way. So let's be putting those pressure, putting that pressure on the shrimp farmers who've never thought about these issues before and say, look, people when people hear about this, they're shocked, and that is bad for your industry. And I've seen positive signs about a lot a lot of shrimp farmers um seeing the need to change. And in some parts of the world, uh they have been changing because it's not actually that difficult to not do this. It's not that difficult to farm shrimp without the the ice stalk ablation.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:25

And ultimately, we hope people reach the conclusion that it's not too difficult to live in a world where we don't farm shrimp at all. Um, but that brings that brings us to the end. We've got a we've got a wrap-up now. But um, it's been great speaking to you. The time's flown by for me. I've I found it so interesting. And um, I really appreciate your insights and your thoughts. Um, and and and importantly, the work that you do as well. And I remember when the the update to the Animal Welfare Sentience Act came out to include cephalopods and decapod crustaceans. And to me, it was such an incredible piece of news and incredible milestone on this journey to recognizing animal sentience meaningfully. So thank you so much for your work in that and for being instrumental in making that happen. As you say, milestone, but let's keep going, you know. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Dr. Birch, for joining me on today's podcast episode. Thanks, Ed. Thank you so much for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the disclosure podcast on whichever platform you listen to it, as doing so means that you can always stay up to date with new episodes. Leaving a review and sharing the podcast is also really helpful. And if you'd like to support the podcast and my work more generally, you can either make a donation through the link in the show notes or sign up to my Substack where I post weekly and share my thoughts and feelings about the experience of living vegan. In the show notes, you can also find links to purchase my books. Thank you again for listening.