Part 1 - AI

I’ve been thinking about my career given given that AI is getting so so good.

I’ve spent some time thinking about where the human premium lies. I used Gemini to help me reflect on this, and I also asked some colleagues whom I deeply trust. It’s also important to look forward as AI continues to develop over the coming months and years — there’s no point focusing on some area X today if we think AI will master X next week.

In summary, the (robust) human premium seems to be:

  1. Responsibility and accountability for high-stakes moral or financial decisions.
  2. Deep, specific context (e.g. highly niche information, local cultural practices, subtle cues in a messy environment).
  3. Black-swan creativity / paradigm shifts (e.g. Einstein’s shift from classical physics to general relativity, moving fully outside of existing thought).
  4. Authentic lived experience and a shared human experience (e.g. empathy, trust).
  5. Doing things in the physical world.

These definitely support animal advocacy roles including:

  • Grantmaking.
  • Movement or organization strategy. Probably not research per se, but rather movement deliberation and strategic decision-making.
  • Corporate or political engagement.
  • Fieldwork. There’s an interesting tension here as many countries in the Global South, which are the highest priority countries for advocacy, are also often the countries where it’s illegal or dangerous to be queer.
  • Regime shifts in thinking.
  • Supporting advocates, e.g. via counselling and therapy.

Part 2 - Related evolutions in my thinking

There are two related shifts in my mindset that I have been contemplating:

  • Shifting from a mindset of quantitative “production efficiency” to a mindset of qualitative “careful action”. Over the past few years, my mental split of quantitative production efficiency vs qualitative careful action has been ~80/20. But given some arbitrary task, AI seems better than humans at executing that task efficiently - that is to say, the human premium no longer lies in the realm of maximizing efficiency, but these slower, more deliberate skills. So I think the optimal mix is shifting to closer to 20/80.
  • Shifting from a mindset of individual action (taking the individual actions that do the most good) to the organization and movement level (supporting larger units to take collective actions that do the most good). I’ve been contemplating this for a few years, and recently discussed this idea with someone from THL: it’s reasonable to measure impact at the level of an org, but probably not any finer-detail than that (e.g., impact of each individual employee).

So, generally, this represents a shift from quantitative productivity at the individual level to qualitative sound action at the collective level.

This also supports a more low-key lifestyle and work-life balance — it doesn’t matter as much how much work or output that you get out of each workday, as the more important thing is supporting collectives to take sound, careful action. It also aligns with the fact that as I age, productivity will necessarily give way, but in return I will develop wisdom and experience.