The Sentience Institute Podcast
Interviews with activists, social scientists, entrepreneurs and change-makers about the most effective strategies to expand humanity’s moral circle, with an emphasis on expanding the circle to farmed animals. Host Jamie Harris, a researcher at moral expansion think tank Sentience Institute, takes a deep dive with guests into advocacy strategies from political initiatives to corporate campaigns to technological innovation to consumer interventions, and discusses advocacy lessons from history, sociology, and psychology.
Episodes
23 episodes
Eric Schwitzgebel on user perception of the moral status of AI
“I call this the emotional alignment design policy. So the idea is that corporations, if they create sentient machines, should create them so that it's obvious to users that they're sentient. And so they evoke appropriate emotional reaction...
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Episode 23
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57:47
Raphaël Millière on large language models
“Ultimately, if you want more human-like systems that exhibit more human-like intelligence, you would want them to actually learn like humans do by interacting with the world and so interactive learning, not just passive learning. You want ...
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Episode 22
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1:49:27
Matti Wilks on human-animal interaction and moral circle expansion
“Speciesism being socially learned is probably our most dominant theory of why we think we're getting the results that we're getting. But to be very clear, this is super early research. We have a lot more work to do. And it's actually not j...
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Episode 21
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1:06:15
David Gunkel on robot rights
“Robot rights are not the same thing as a set of human rights. Human rights are very specific to a singular species, the human being. Robots may have some overlapping powers, claims, privileges, or immunities that would need to be recognize...
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Episode 20
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1:04:27
Kurt Gray on human-robot interaction and mind perception
“And then you're like, actually, I can't know what it's like to be a bat—again, the problem of other minds, right? There's this fundamental divide between a human mind and a bat, but at least a bat's a mammal. What is it like to be an AI? I...
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Episode 19
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59:10
Thomas Metzinger on a moratorium on artificial sentience development
And for an applied ethics perspective, I think the most important thing is if we want to minimize suffering in the world, and if we want to minimize animal suffering, we should always, err on the side of caution, we should always be on the ...
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1:50:44
Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on global priorities research and effective strategies to reduce suffering
“We think that the most important thing right now is capacity building. We’re not so much focused on having impact now or in the next year, we’re thinking about the long term and the very big picture… Now, what exactly does capacity buildin...
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1:16:25
Tobias Baumann of the Center for Reducing Suffering on moral circle expansion, cause prioritization, and reducing risks of astronomical suffering in the long-term future
“If some beings are excluded from moral consideration then the results are usually quite bad, as evidenced by many forms of both current and historical suffering… I would definitely say that those that don’t have any sort of political...
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1:18:40
Jo Anderson of Faunalytics and Saulius Šimčikas of Rethink Priorities on research for effective animal advocacy
We [Faunalytics] put out a lot of things in 2020. Some of the favorites that I [Jo] have, probably top of the list, I’m really excited about our animal product impact scales, where we did a lot of background research to figure out and estim...
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1:35:20
Ajay Dahiya of The Pollination Project on funding grassroots animal advocacy and inner transformation
“Why inner transformation, why these practices are also built into model: unless we root out the root cause of the issue, which is disconnection, which is a lack of understanding that we are interrelated, and therefore I have an inherent re...
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1:43:11
Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on how we can best help wild animals
“The main work that really needs to be carried out here is work in the intersection of animal welfare science and the science of ecology and other fields in life science… You could also build a career, not as a scientist, but say, in public...
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1:19:38
Oscar Horta of the University of Santiago de Compostela on why we should help wild animals
“We want there to be animals like elephants, who on average have very good lives, rather than animals who tend to have very bad lives… If you have, say, a population of animals who reproduce by laying a million eggs. On average, only two of...
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1:28:50
Leah Garcés of Mercy For Animals on factory farm investigations, long-term strategy, and animal advocacy during COVID-19
“Our challenge is one where investigations are very hard. The people who do this work, I cannot tell you how smart they are. They are doing all kinds of research, not just getting the footage. The footage is the last thing they’re getting; ...
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1:35:58
Frank Baumgartner of UNC-Chapel Hill on policy dynamics, lobbying, and issue framing
“In my career, one of the things that I’ve focused on the most is developing the theory of punctuated equilibrium. And I think recognising that things occasionally go through real transformations with radical change has changed people’s und...
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1:51:10
Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute on the bottlenecks to the scale-up of cultured meat and plant-based meat
“There’s a relatively clear path on dramatically reducing the costs of the cell culture media. So I’d say it's definitely the most pressing bottleneck… not perhaps the most technically involved bottleneck… The recombinant proteins are by fa...
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2:21:25
Laila Kassam of Animal Think Tank on popular protest movements, mass arrests, and publicity stunts
Social movements often seek to shift public opinion and mobilize supporters on a large scale. But which tactics achieve these goals most effectively? And how have social movements achieved this in the past?Dr Laila Kassam is a co-founder...
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1:37:51
Jayasimha Nuggehalli on capacity building and animal welfare in Asia
“The three things that need to be done for Asia are capacity building, capacity building, and capacity building. There’s this tendency of wanting to do things at a global level, having uniformization across countries. But a lot of these pol...
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1:53:55
Lisa Feria of Stray Dog Capital on impact investing and animal-free food tech entrepreneurship
I think we forget sometimes because we look at Impossible, we look at Beyond, that they’re the tip of the spear, but there’s so much work and so much opportunity out there… We need to get to all the categories… Seafood in general is very, v...
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1:43:10
Christie Lagally of Rebellyous Foods on scaling up high-quality plant-based foods
Since about 75% or so (and that’s just a rough estimate)... of plant-based products on the market today are actually made on off-the-shelf meat processing equipment, we’re looking to actually change that part of the industry by actually des...
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Episode 5
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1:08:11
Kristof Dhont of University of Kent on intergroup contact research and research careers
More positive contact [with an outgroup] reduces prejudice. No matter how you measure it, no matter how you set up your study design, once there’s a positive contact situation, you lower prejudice towards the outgroup... These effects tend ...
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Episode 4
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1:54:51
Pei Su of ACTAsia on humane education in China
We welcome the Chinese government's policy on the various other nonprofit organizations that they support, and I think this is all a very positive development on the ground… [But] to reduce meat consumption is probably one of the hardest is...
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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1:10:53
Ria Rehberg of Veganuary on driving institutional change through online campaigns
I see the pledge program a lot as a means to an end to get institutional change to happen… We're spending about 40% of our staff time and resources on corporate engagement and institutional change. While the marketing side of things is also...
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Season 1
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Episode 2
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1:46:37
Kevin Schneider of the Nonhuman Rights Project on using litigation to expand the moral circle
I think within five years, we will absolutely see… the first nonhuman animals recognized as holders of rights in the US; ‘persons’... [I don’t think] the gates [would be] flung open if we start to see one or two species recognized as having...
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Season 1
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Episode 1
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2:12:05