Everything's An Emergency

“Everything’s an emergency” is the title of a book that I have not read. It’s also the title of a very good substack by Bess Stillman, wife of the recently deceased Jake Seliger. It also happens to be true.

Every day, about 14,000 children die. That’s 5 million per year, 10 per minute. Many of these children die in the arms of their parents who love them, but who cannot save them—they lie in distant and desperately poor countries beyond the reach of modern medicine. Most of these deaths are preventable. But they are not prevented.

About 80 billion land animals are slaughtered every year. That’s about 200 million per day, 9 million per hour, 375,000 per minute, 6,000 per second. Most of these animals endured hellish lives in factory farms; beaten, caged, abused, forced to live in nightmarish conditions without ever being able to turn around or stretch their wings. Imagine looking out over a vast sea of 6,000 animal carcasses; that is what we produce every second.

Imagine that there was a machine that every second murdered 6,000 dogs. Before killing them, however, it subjected them to cruelty and indignity; it locked them in a cage where they did not see the sun. It sliced off their claws with a knife, and castrated them with no anesthetic. It genetically engineered them so that they became hideous inversions of their natural state—too obese to move without great pain, forced to constantly lie against the painful wire meshing that surrounds them. The dogs in the cages went crazy, routinely biting each other. Injury was routine, extreme, and often lethal.

This is the scale of the horror of factory farming. We are annually eviscerating a population of land animals roughly equal in number to all humans who have ever lived.

Even this horror is but a tiny drop compared to the suffering of wild animals. By very conservative estimates, there are 10^17 morally important wild animals. If we assume conservatively this is roughly the number that die in a year, that comes out to around 3 billion deaths a second. Compared to the 3 billion painful deaths per second, everything else looks like a mere drop against this vast ocean of suffering. Given that most animals live short lives, it’s much more likely that at least 30 billion conscious animals die a second, and potentially the number is even in the trillions.

Right now, AI companies are building artificial superintelligence at breakneck pace. They readily acknowledge that AI is coming soon and that they do not have a plan to make it safe. We are like small children playing with a bomb. Absent very careful action, the superintelligence that we are building could be our doom—as we supplanted chimps, they may supplant us.

Over and over again, we’ve had near misses from nuclear weapons and biolabs. The world has developed the technology to blow itself up, and yet has spent depressingly little time making sure that doesn’t happen.

Everything’s an emergency. I’ve written in other places about why I like effective altruism. But if I had to put it in one sentence, I would say the following. Everything’s an emergency, and effective altruism is an effort in tackling those emergencies with the seriousness they deserve.