They're on the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence. And Animal Rights.

People on the frontier in one area are often able to recognize the frontiers in others. Famously, Jeremy Bentham was on the frontier of gender and race equality in an era when non-discrimination sounded more like a joke than a legitimate philosophy. It should come as no surprise that he was also on the frontier of animal rights.

The ability to see multiple frontiers might seem surprising, as expertise in one area doesn’t necessarily imply expertise in others. But expertise is not the same as wisdom. And there is an essential piece of wisdom that one obtains on any frontier: the world is not as stable as it seems.

That is why it is encouraging, but not surprising to me, that people on the frontier of AI seem unusually supportive of animal rights. Perhaps most famously, the founder of OpenAI Sam Altman is a vegetarian who once posted that eating meat should be cancelled, and that it will someday be looked back on with horror.

But it is not just Sam, among AI leaders, who has a propensity toward anti-speciesist thinking. Demis Hassabis and Mustafy Suleman, the co-founders of Google DeepMind, have been early investors in alt-meat startups. Chris Olah, one of co-founders of Anthropic and a leader in understanding the underlying mechanisms of deep neural networks, is a hardcore animal advocate. Even Elon Musk, who famously got into a friendship-destroying argument over “speciesism” with Google’s Larry Page, has shown recent pro-animal tendencies. Among his many complaints about the Biden administration was that it killed millions of hens.

I do not mean to suggest that these figures have general wisdom. The ability to see momentum for change is just one form of wisdom among many. But it is an important one, and one that should give us confidence. If the people who foresaw this coming technological revolution are also correct about the coming moral revolution, the future will be a good one for animals.