I'm against legalizing bestiality because the animal consent problem hasn't been solved, but probably actually will be quite soon thanks to Al (at least for the higher animals with complex languages). So why not wait a few more years. I don't see disgust as a good reason. It was an evolutionary adaptation of the agricultural era against the spread of zoonotic illnesses, but technology will soon make that entirely irrelevant as well.
There's no animal I'm aware of that has a mental capacity beyond that of a child. We don't think children are capable of giving consent - are we clearing the way to legalise paedophilia too, or are there animals with the mental capacity to provide informed consent that only lack the ability to communicate that consent?
Spoiler: It's not a communication issue. If this technocratic psycho was more concerned with actually contemplating the morality of the question, and less focused on rearranging the insides of a parrot, his takes might be a little less monstrous.
If this technocratic psycho was more concerned with actually contemplating the morality of the question, and less focused on rearranging the insides of a parrot, his takes might be a little less monstrous.
It's always funny realizing those who think they're asking the tough questions that others aren't smart enough to consider only ever talk about the same handful of topics: putting down minorities, advocating white supremacy, whining about anyone to the left of Pinochet and fucking animals/kids.
Like that's 95% of the content on the Motte or "I"DW.
Kinda makes you wonder what they'd be capable of if they stopped spending all their time whining that they can't say the thing they never fucking shut up about.
I don't want to endorse dolphin fucking or whatever but idk if we can necessarily very accurately map non human intelligence onto stages of human intelligence development. Like human children can idk stack blocks but they're also very emotionally volatile and forgetful. Whales can't stack blocks but they have a lot of emotional stability, good memories, and large stable social groups. How do you map between that? They're not human.
In some ways non human animals appear very similar, especially other mammals and their social relationships and emotions. In other ways they appear very different. They're their own thing and I think overly simplifying their minds by trying to work out some human age equivalent will just mislead us. It's not like a pig that can do calculus would suddenly become a reasonable romantic partner haha.
Philosophical question: if brutally torturing and murdering billions of animals is fine, why do we draw the line at sex? I’m a vegetarian and have never ideated it, but the position is untenable.
edit: What I’m saying is apparently nobody gives a fuck about consent when we’re talking about putting intelligent beings in a box barely bigger than themselves and feeding them slop until we think they’re overweight enough to unceremoniously dump dozens at a time into a gas chamber where we choke them while they’re conscious. But now that wieners are involved we’re suddenly holier than thou? Come on.
I think your framing is flawed (I don't think it's an issue of consent so much as it's an issue of creating animal suffering for personal benefit), but I broadly agree - I personally get past the hypocrisy because I have no interest in fucking animals, and push the suffering I cause by eating animal products to the back of my mind and pretending it's not a thing. Responsibility is also meaningfully abstracted in the food example, making it far easier to pretend you're not at fault compared to having a chicken impaled on your dick.
In a similar way, people consuming products made in sweatshops and people downloading CSA material are both exploiting children.
perhaps he’s not hoping for “animals able to enthusiastically consent” but is in fact hoping for “animals amenable to participating in the free market and the world’s oldest profession”
Why do I feel like this guy knows exactly how far a Scooby snack gets you.
How the fuck will LLMs help you flirt with Mr Snuffle paws? What is going on in this guy's head?
It's fascinating seeing everyone project onto this things. Like a rorschach test of desires. You have the madcap industrialist slavering over firing all humans, the nerd rapturists, the sexbot enthusiasts, the doomsday preppers, and apparently dolphinfuckers now.
LLMs are AGI, high intelligence is magic, so the AGI can not only understand language, it can understand the language of all beings, or if that is not possible, just uplift their intelligence and make them intelligence? How you ask? Well
Nerd makeover except gpt is fed an image of the contestant and asked how to make them over. Contestant then goes to a mingle or speed dating or whatever. Using guidance from the chatbot on what to say and do.
I don’t think the guy even understands consent tbh.
So why not wait a few more years
The world this posits is wild. First, you’ve got a person wanting to commit bestiality, but only wants it if it is legal, otherwise, why wait? Second, we’re going to both translate animal language (or neural activity if you wanna go steelman) into human language and back. And third, we’re gonna use that to successfully teach animals sex education (that, mind you, many countries already don’t have a great track record on teaching humans sex ed). Fourth, somehow these animals will be able to comprehend any of this in a meaningful way for the legal system to recognise their ability to consent (again, bad track record). And fifth the animals will actually consent.
I'll be shocked when dude builds his translator, and every animal, rock, and inanimate object reliably says how much it wants to fuck him. Could the translator be wrong? No, he must be that desirable.
If there's one thing I'll definitely take a very conservative stance on, it's that beastiality is absolutely disgusting and should not be legal, ever. If it's something like Sonic or a fictional drawing of an anthro on e621, fine, but if it's your pet dog Helga, you need serious help.
Knowing just a smidgeon about how the statistical parrots work, I wonder were they will get the dataset for the animal languages.
This reminds me, I read an article in Nature about teaching dogs to read. Now, this was a 19th century article in a 19th century Nature, so it described how the author had written "food" on a note and placed it on the food bowl and placed a blank note on an empty bowl and eventually gotten his dog to fetch the note that had "food" written on it. Alas, due to unforeseen circumstances, it was hard to expand into more advanced literature.
So where to get the dataset? Nevermind, Magical AI to the rescue!
It reminds me of the classic story of the guy who trained his mule to subsist without eating. He trained it by giving it less and less food every day,but just when it was about ready to go without food,the stupid animal died.
the animal consent problem hasn’t been solved, but probably actually will be quite soon thanks to Al (at least for the higher animals with complex languages)
CW discussion of bestiality
So... there are animals with complex languages, which AI will help us understand, and we can then ask the animals if they are ok with us fucking them. (I'm not sure what animals these are. Dolphins? Whales? The great apes? The stereotypical victims of bestiality - barnyard animals raped by horny and/or lonely men - don't seem to qualify to me)
This raises further disturbing questions. Assuming we can really understand these animals enough for them to give consent to sex, where does this put humans who are now seen as unable to (the mentally disabled, children, elderly people with dementia)? If it's both ok to have sex with a pig because an AI told us it was ok, and slaughter that same pig for food, then surely it's ok to have sex with a kid, because they're at least accorded more rights than most animals, and we don't need AI to communicate with them.
They either have not thought this through, or thought way too much about it.
The point is, how do we know that "animals can give consent"? "If you have sex with me, I won't kill and eat you" is like the epitome of power imbalance.
iirc he was some sort of Trump person who was outed as writing for a white nationalist site and then Musk became on of his reply guys and he got quite a bit of fame from that. But I could be wrong.
If killing animals for the entertainment of your palate is morally ok, then raping animals for the entertainment of your dick/vagina should also be morally ok. You dont need to do either of these things, yet 95%+ of people continue choosing to do one of them. Is it weird that some people think it is ok to also do the 2nd thing?
And in before "what if the animal consents and we can talk to animals through AI". You can talk to children and you still shouldnt fuck them.
Uh, one of those options provides food, which is critical for life. Yes, you can not eat meat, that's not what I'm specifying. Compared to beastiality eating meat suffices a tangible need.
Food is critical for human life but not meat. Unless you are living in a remote island in the middle of the ocean, you can have a tasty and healthy vegan diet by visiting a supermarket. But most people choose not to. They value the perceived entertainment they get from eating animal products higher than the death and suffering they cause.
It isnt a big leap from that position to bestiality. If you see animals as commodity to serve humans and not living beings with agency, why not fuck them. You are killing them in an industrial scale, raping them almost seems minor in comparison.
Hell you can even kill them afterwards and claim you are using the "whole animal" therefore you are more ethical than people who just murder animals without raping them first.
You can make all kinds of absurd debatebro arguments, anything that can enable you to ignore the massive animal Holocaust that is so normalized in our society.
I do tire of over and over explaining to vegans how the natural predation cycle works and that if aliens picked me up off the earth and promised to tend all my injuries and illnesses and give me all the food I could ask for in exchange for a slightly shorter than natural lifespan and as painless a death as they knew how to make it, I'd probably take them up on their offer.
Just because something is natural, it doesnt mean it is moral. Rape is natural and extremely common but we as society have decided that it is not cool. Though not everyone seems to have gotten the memo.
Animals in the meat and dairy industry live horrific lives and are pumped full of antibiotics because that is cheaper than providing them with proper living conditions.
And they dont live slightly shorter lives, most them are killed while they are still kids because that is more economically efficient. We just pump them full of hormones and/or genetically modified them to gain mass(meat) as fast as possible.
Here is a table that shows how long animals can live vs when they get slaughtered
Ultimately it is about agency and realizing that other animals are like us and deserve to live their lives and not to be treated as commodity for our entertainment.
If you have the choice to greatly reduce the suffering and death you cause, with very little effort, why wouldnt you do it.