Experimental evaluation of algorithms for solving problems with combinatorial explosion

AI ethics: the case for including animals

“…AI may provide early identification of diseases and injuries suffered by the animals, and thereby reduce animal suffering, and they could reduce or eliminate the sadistic brutality to animals occasionally shown by factory farm workers. 41 Although this is possible, given that industrial animal production is driven by profitability in a competitive marketplace, rather than by consideration of animal welfare, we consider it more likely that if AI can more closely monitor the health of animals, this will also enable producers to respond by crowding even more animals into confined spaces, thus making their enterprises more profitable, even if the increased crowding results in great stress and higher mortality for the animals.…”

“…Ethical decisionmaking in AI systems, just like other decision-making processes in AI systems, needs computational power and resources, and obviously, the broader the scope of concern the more the computation that needs to be done. Because of what has been called the "combinatorial explosion effect" [41], increasing the number of beings an AI system is concerned about may increase the computation needed exponentially, rather than linearly. For the inclusion of small and abundant animals in AI systems, this poses a serious economic constraint, and perhaps even a physical constraint.…”