EA - Future technological progress does NOT correlate with methods that involve less suffering by Jim Buhler

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Future technological progress does NOT correlate with methods that involve less suffering, published by Jim Buhler on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Summary: The alleged inevitable convergence between efficiency and methods that involve less suffering is one of the main arguments I've heard in favor of assuming the expected value of the future of humanity is positive, and I think it is invalid. While increased efficiency luckily converges with less biological suffering so far, this seems to be due to the physical limitations of humans and other animals rather than due to their suffering per se. And while past and present suffering beings all have severe physical limitations making them "inefficient", future forms of sentience will likely make this past trend completely irrelevant. Future forms of suffering might even be instrumentally very useful and therefore "efficient", such that we could make the reverse argument. Note that the goal of this post is not to argue that technological progress is bad, but simply to call out one specific claim that, despite its popularity, is - I think - just wrong.The original argumentWhile I've been mostly facing this argument in informal conversation, it has been (I think pretty well) fleshed out by Ben West (2017): (emphasis is mine)[W]e should expect there to only be suffering in the future if that suffering enables people to be lazier [(i.e., if it is instrumentally "efficient".] The most efficient solutions to problems don't seem like they involve suffering. [...] Therefore, as technology progresses, we will move more towards solutions which don't involve suffering[.]Like most people I've heard use this argument, he illustrates his point with the following two examples:Factory farming exists because the easiest way to get food which tastes good and meets various social goals people have causes cruelty. Once we get more scientifically advanced though, it will presumably become even more efficient to produce foods without any conscious experience at all by the animals (i.e. clean meat); at that point, the lazy solution is the more ethical one.(This arguably is what happened with domestic work animals on farms: we now have cars and trucks which replaced horses and mules, making even the phrase "beat like a rented mule" seem appalling.)Slavery exists because there is currently no way to get labor from people without them having conscious experience. Again though, this is due to a lack of scientific knowledge: there is no obvious reason why conscious experience is required for plowing a field or harvesting cocoa, and therefore the more efficient solution is to simply have nonconscious robots do these tasks.(This arguably is what happened with human slavery in the US: industrialization meant that slavery wasn't required to create wealth in a large chunk of the US, and therefore slavery was outlawed.)Why this argument is invalidWhile I tentatively think the "the most efficient solutions to problems don't seem like they involve suffering" claim is true if we limit ourselves to the present and the past, I think it is false once we consider the long-term future, which makes the argument break apart.Future solutions are more efficient insofar as they overcome past limitations. In the relevant examples that are enslaved humans and exploited animals, suffering itself is not a limiting factor. It is rather the physical limitations of those biological beings, relative to machines that could do a better job at their tasks.I don't see any inevitable dependence between their suffering and these physical limitations. If human slaves and exploited animals were not sentient, this wouldn't change the fact that machines would do a better job.The fact that suffering has been correlated with inefficiency so far seems to be ...