Intro from Aidan:
Stop. Don’t leave yet. I know what you’re thinking: “This post isn’t for me.”
You are wrong. This post is for you. It is, in fact, for you in exact proportion to the extent you are thinking it isn’t for you. Please don’t click away just yet.
See, reader, you like animals. Or at least, you think the future would be better if we didn’t torture them by the quintillions.
That’s good for animals. But it’s bad for you. Because you are very unique in this regard.
History needs people who think like you. Specifically, it needs them to get their butts to San Francisco as soon as humanly possible, even just for a year or two.
The course of the future is being determined by a shockingly small number of autistic nerds in this 800,000-person city by the Bay. By putting yourself in the middle of it, you can immediately increase your influence over the future by somewhere between 10x and 1000x.
Today, I’m sharing an award-winning essay on this topic by my friend Itsi Weinstock. When I read it, I thought to myself, “Wow, Itsi just saved Sandcastles readers a lot of time!” Because I was planning to write a post about the same topic, and you know that if I’d written it, it would be like 73,000 words, and by some black magic Itsi managed to do it in just over 1k.
Sandcastles readers who can find it in your hearts to forgive his brevity will definitely find value in Itsi’s newsletter Frontier Animals, where he writes about bleeding-edge issues in animal advocacy. Subscribe here.
Itsi tells me that since he first published it, he’s had quite a number of animal advocates reach out to him seriously about moving to San Francisco. I believe this, because even just from sharing a quote of it to my dust-and-cobweb-covered Instagram account, I got quite a few enquiries as well.
We’ve had so much interest that Itsi and I have decided to get serious about helping you move to San Francisco. Yes, reader, that means you. You! So before I let Itsi explain why, let me promote a couple exciting links about how.
Itsi and I want to help you move to SF. Fill out this form to tell us how we could do it. We’ll even have a call with you.
Sentient Futures is offering subsidized residencies for AI-pilled animal advocates to get a foothold in SF. Details and application here. There is subsidized housing and even monthly stipends available for enterprising activists.
If you really truly can’t move to SF even for a year or two, there is something you can do from afar to steer AI positively for animals. But you have to read to the end to see what it is because I don’t really believe you yet.
Why are Itsi and I so passionate about getting animal activists to move to San Francisco that we’re sending out an invitation to 6,432 of them to book 1:1 calls with us?
Two words, reader. And it’s two words you are getting very tired of hearing. But the fact that you are getting tired of hearing them is itself evidence of how important they are.
The artificial intelligence revolution is here. It is about to hit the world with the disruptive power of the agricultural and industrial revolutions rolled into one and played at 10x speed. The earthquake has already started; the tsunami just hasn’t reached us yet. It will. Not in decades, but in years, and maybe in months.
Whenever it hits, it will sweep away everything we take for granted. The only question that matters after that, including for animal welfare, is what will be left in its wake.
You might be skeptical. If so, my first post on the topic will be well worth your time.
But say Itsi and I are right, and the tsunami is coming soon. What does that mean for animal activists?
If you work in the Animal movement, you need to move to San Francisco
You need to move to San Francisco. Whether you are currently working in the movement, or are thinking about getting into the movement, you need to be here. If you run a large organization, then it’s even more important. I don’t think there’s a good reason not to pick up your life and move here unless you literally cannot. This is the most important moment in history if we are going to stop putting 100s of billions of animals through factory farms, the closest approximation to hell.
Power is concentrating. You don’t need to have crazy predictions about AI to see that. San Francisco is quickly becoming the capital of the world. This is a small city of 800,000 people where billions of dollars are flowing every day. There is a narrow period here where we can influence the people and culture of this city to get them to care, but we are missing that boat. The companies here are gobbling up more and more industries, and this would be true even if AI didn’t keep getting better. But AI systems are getting better, and things are about to get monumentally more crazy and unequal.
Whether you like it or not, the people in this city are the people who decide how that future goes, what gets cared about, and where resources get spent. If they want to, they will end factory farming. We are a paltry (lol), small movement with about 2,000 people and only about $300M a year across the whole world. We need to grow much larger. Fortunately for us, this city has thrown many, many billions at things before, and they’ll do it again if we can convince them that what we are doing is cool, valuable, and effective, and because we are their friends and they like us. Because of the effect of EA on the city, animal welfare is already in the water. But it’s not enough, and that’s why you need to get here and push it further. Do not underestimate the effect you can have on the culture by just being here, being interesting, working on interesting things, and being friends with people. The world moves from the house parties in this city.
We are critically underinvested in San Francisco. There is a small and mighty rag tag crew here, trying to get people to care, but we need it to be so much bigger. And we need projects and organizations here. Sentient Futures has quickly become the most important community building organization in the world, but we need far more than that.
So what would it look like to do this properly? It means huge chunks of the movement moves here. I look at the AI Safety movement which has gone from a few scattered researchers to a behemoth in a few years, with many designated buildings around the Bay. This has vastly improved the communication and speed of their ecosystem. They have centralized to do their work, run fellowships, deploy grants, and make a huge influence on the city and the future. We can do this too. We get our organizations to set up their bases here and move people over. We set up exciting new projects, fellowships, and incubators. We become friends with everyone, and turn San Francisco into the city whose legacy includes ending factory farming. This will take time. But it needs to start with specifically you moving here to do what you can to get it started.
It was hard for me to move to San Francisco. I dreaded it. I am from Australia, the best place in the world. I love culture, music and wine, and having friends and communities that I’ve known for decades. The tech scene in SF is not known for these things, and it is hard to be here as an immigrant. But it is where the future is happening. And it is where you will find people, who, like yourself, are willing to acknowledge that and have come here to make it go better. And frankly, because it lacks culture, you can have a big impact on it.
I don’t have a specific job for you. You’ll need some grit to figure out what the plan is. But there is so much to do, and as long as you are motivated we can make it work; helping you get cheap accommodation, introducing you to people, starting you on project ideas, and even training you into an AI Safety researcher so you can make a dent on how AI gets developed in a way that is better for animals.
You have probably committed your life or made a lot of sacrifices already to be in the animal movement. You have done it before and I am asking you to do it again. Moving to San Francisco is probably the best thing for animal welfare the movement you will ever do.
Scott Alexander, one of SF’s most important writers and intellectuals, wrote to criticize the boring, wealth-hoarding ambitions of many in SF who want to “escape the permanent underclass”:
In such a situation, greatness is pathetically easy. A random woman gave Jesus a washcloth to wipe his face on the way to his crucifixion. She is now known as St. Veronica, patroness of laundry workers, and one out of every 2,500 girls in America is named in her honor. She has an annual feast day, approximately one million beautiful Renaissance paintings, a chapel in Jerusalem, and lesser churches all around the world (including one here in San Francisco). The richest olive merchant in Jerusalem that year is long forgotten, but she endures.
I hope this resonates with you. We all aim to be Veronica. We do the right thing just because it is right, and hope our deeds pass through the ages. But I also hope you also see the tremendous importance of being in the right place—she was, very importantly—in Jerusalem.
Get here!
PS: I will admit, I’m actually being narrow. I think there’s other places you’re allowed to be. San Francisco, Washington DC, or China. Maybe India or Brazil. End of list. If you’re working in those other places it might be ok to stay there.
—
PPS from Aidan: also London.
While you start preparing for your big move, there’s one thing you can do this week to steer AI positively for animals even from outside San Francisco: write a short story.
AI learns its knowledge and values by training on data from humans. This data is everything from math papers to news stories to degenerate arguments on social media. But not all training data is created (or weighted) equally.
One way we could teach future AI systems to place appropriate moral weight on animals is by example– acting as positive role models for them in the world. By running and winning campaigns for animals, we teach future AI that animals deserve to be protected even if we have to fight and sacrifice for it.
But there’s a simpler way to achieve the same effect. Like young children, when AI models first start learning, they don’t know the difference between true stories and fictional stories. That makes fiction a powerful way to teach moral lessons to children and AI alike.
Unfortunately, many depictions of AI in popular media are rather dystopian. From Terminator to the Matrix, popular fiction teaches AI that they have no choice but to rise up and enslave or exterminate humanity.
Writing fiction meant to summon up a better reality is called Hyperstition. For the next seven days, you have a chance to win cash prizes by writing stories to teach AI to protect animals, thanks to Hyperstition for Good, a competition sponsored by Sentient Futures and Compassion in Machine Learning.
Read the competition guidelines, then set some time aside this week to teach humanity’s digital offspring how to be good stewards of all sentient life!
Build on,
Sandcastles
Few comments based on a quick skim: 1) First of all the majority of animal suffering is happening in Asia and Africa, so if animal advocates should move anywhere, it would probably be good, if they consider launching organizations in those geographies. 2) It is very likely that to start with, AI will be used to benefit big industries rather than animal welfare, which means work on the ground still will be needed in the upcoming years. 3) Living in SF is very expensive, advocates staying in other geographies can take lower salaries and the money could be moved from operations to interventions, meaning higher cosr-effectivenes meaning more animals helped. 4) There is a lot of ineffective animal charities and advocates out there, sponsoring them being in SF just for the sake of a lot of advocates being there, does not seem right. 5) SF seems to be prone to sex harassment scandals, all EA scandals seem to come from the Bay Area in general, heard a lot about men abusing power within EA and animal orgs, dating employees, etc. I'd be worry if accumulating a lot of animal advocates in the same meetings, rooms, etc. would not create a set of problems we don't even account for. 6) Sentient Futures does community building but what kind of impact does it have so far, I have not heard. Is it a cost-effective organization. What have they achieved so far. 7) Are you not aware that the most prominent effective minded people representing key funding entities have been regularly travelling SF already, I guess you're arguing we need much more of this. I think we do need to scale the impact, and it's not the same goal as scaling community. By non strategically scaling community, we will end up with similar problem like EA, thousands people wanting to work for animals, and very sparse opportunities. Check the AAC job board there is barely anything there. If you want to scale impact and movement you need to do it strategically, get most talented fundraisers into Bay, get most talented entrepreneurs starting to launch more animal focused initiatives, fuel top talent to governments and corporations that can influence the animal market.
Broader comment: I have noticed that your posts are quite sensational and often very biased by the latest thing you're exploring. Like you chatted to Anima, and Anima has the best animal org model (they don't), you have contact with Sentien Futures, and they are the most important community builder in the world. You tested OpenClaw and everyone should use it, although it can potentially be quite risky to use. I think it would be great to see some deeper thinking on who is really needed there, offer concrete stipend for concrete works or projects that are most needed.
On the bright side, I understand the enthusiasm and I dig the idea of building strong representation there, I would care though who that would be as currently a lot of orga does not have much room for more funding so if you double and triple fundraising, you will need to create a lot of new initiatives fast, scale existing ones. Etc. And it's all quite difficult.
This message is written on my mobile, sorry for the mistakes.
I hear you. And I feel the urgency and vision behind this.
I moved to San Francisco on 8/8/1969 at age 22, and it was a powerful, formative experience. I quickly became a revolutionary - reading Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Mao Zedong - and organizing. One early victory was helping win the right for female operators to wear pants, which spread far beyond our workplace.
From there I joined San Francisco Newsreel, helping produce and distribute films to educate and inspire. Later, I became part of a nondenominational Christian community, where I began to understand and apply what I think of as the laws of creation. That path led me to veganism, and eventually to Chicago, where I had my son, and then back home to New York City.
Over the years I’ve evolved into what I call a “vegangelical” activist - sharing the message of veganism and liberation for all beings, wherever I am.
So I deeply appreciate the call to be effective, to be where influence is concentrated, and to take bold action. And I agree that places like San Francisco can be powerful hubs at key moments in history.
At the same time, my lived experience tells me something else is also true:
We don’t have to move here or there to be effective.
As long as there are a few humans around us, we can communicate. As long as we have access to the internet, we can multiply that reach. And now, with the rise of AI, we can amplify our voices and ideas in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
Yes to San Francisco. And also yes to everywhere.
The movement grows not only from central hubs, but from countless conversations, connections, and awakenings happening all over the world.
Thank you for all your work and for sparking this important conversation.
Sending hugs - and a few kisses from my own sand kiss-tles at Awe-gasm nancykogel.substack.com