Comment by ceejayoz
2 days ago
> We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.
Sure. But some of the species we breed at scale might prefer we did just eradicate them, like the chickens that grow so fast their entire giant breast muscle becomes chewy scar tissue.
(It's also not true for, say, whales; no harm, but we wanted their shit. If they have language, their stories probably heavily feature their own Holocaust. Nor passenger pigeons, who we just got rid of.)
We didn't just get rid of passenger pigeons, they were hunted for meat and as game and driven away or killed to prevent them from damaging crops.
Chickens are another example of high variability in treatment, battery farms exist but so do more humane agricultural practices as well as chickens who are essentially kept as pets.
My argument was specifically against the idea that AI will "embeds itself in robotic tanks and murders everyone after already having collapsed the economy." with proof given as "We are the proof: what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves? Now take away the moral compass and there you go. QED."
Those are strong statements that aren't solidly grounded in logic or fact.