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ElectricSheep, FutureKind
FutureKind is our free, entry-level-to- intermediate AI for impact fellowship course, focussing specifically on food system transformation, and animal protection. Absolutely no coding experience is required, just a desire and curiosity to be mentored to learn about, direct and deploy AI safely and intentionally to make serious impact for all sentient beings.
The FutureKind AI Fellowship is open for applications! This is our free, entry-level-to- intermediate, expert- mentored fellowship-style course, focussing specifically on the intersection of AI, food system transformation, and animal protection. It's twelve weeks of mentored learning about and learning to build AI that works for social good. Absolutely no coding experience is required, just a desire and curiosity to use AI intentionally and safely to make the biggest positive impact in our era.
You'll experience:
🎓 The Learning Block (weeks 1-6):
- Survey current & emerging AI applications with significant implications for animals, such as in optimising factory farming or decoding animal communication
- Gain access to powerful AI tools for animal advocacy
- Explore impactful career pathways at the AI/animals frontier
🏗️ The Project Block (weeks 7-12):
- Transition from learners to doers
- Prepare a final work drawing on what you have learned during the course: a concrete contribution to animal welfare & protection
- To support their research, collaboration, & project development, you will have access to ChatNGO, a powerful AI platform tailored for nonprofits, generously provided by Stray Dog Institute
- On top of this, you will also receive tailored mentorship from leading professionals across academia, industry, & other sectors who will guide your project development & career building
Futurekind is built on a successful pilot that took place in 2024. You can experience some of what the pilot programme comprised - and get a flavour for what's to come if you join the program - by enrolling below, You'll find free resources and session prompts from our taster course.
The Futurekind AI Fellowship is a 12-week learning & professional development journey created by AI safety education org . It introduces you to the rapidly developing intersection of AI & animal welfare– & arms you with future-proof knowledge & project mentorship to accelerate your career.
Here's what's on offer:
Session format
Sessions consist in weekly facilitated discussions (1.5-2 hours). Readings & pre-session exercises will take 2-3 hours per week. Apart from this, there will also be optional workshops & Q&As with senior researchers & practitioners from key career fields.
Program
Week 1. What AI Means for Animals: The Present & Near Future
Week 2. Precision Livestock Farming
Week 3. Animal Communication
Week 4. Animals & AI: The Long-Term Future
Week 5. AI-powered Animal Advocacy
Week 6. Taking Action: Technical & Governance Solutions / Introduction to Capstone Project
Weeks 7-12. Project sprint with industry mentorship
No technical knowledge is needed to participate. If you're unsure about your fit, we encourage you to apply anyway! We welcome participants from a variety of backgrounds.
Week One: Introduction to AI and Animal welfare (Pilot Session 1/2)
Learning Objectives
In this first session, we’ll immerse ourselves in foundational concepts in AI and animal welfare. We'll explore the promise and peril of AI at the intersections of human welfare and animal protection - and develop our understanding of (reducing) suffering risks.
By the end of this session you should be able to:
Don't forget to join the Electric Sheep Slack group to meet fellow learners and share thoughts on our work. The link is here:
Resources
The following are required/foundational resources to get the most out of this week's session.
1. What AI Could Mean for Animals,
[21min read; 34:36 audio version available]
Provides a bird’s eye view of both good & bad ways in which AI technologies can affect animal welfare
This short post offers a quick introduction to S-risks– risks of “astronomical” suffering.
3. AI Ethics: The Case for Including Animals (partial),
[3 pages; 6min reading]
Useful introduction to the ethical implications of AI technologies, with animals as vulnerable populations. You only need read sections 1-3.2.
4. Video: 'An Aligned AGI would end factory farming' (partial): .
[Minute 41:00 to end (30 mins)]
A useful bonus discussion on our emerging understanding of the relationships between AI, sentience and animal rights.
Additional Resources
These additional readings offer further background on this session and are definitely worth your time if you have it. We'd recommend no more than one from each section if you have the time. You can always come back to these resources later on.
On animals & AI:
On S-risk:
Pre-Session Exercises
Please try to complete these exercises at least 24 hours before your session. That will give our teaching staff time to look at them and respond with comments where appropriate.
Exercise 1 of 2: AI is being used to change our relationships with animals in many ways. Some examples:
Find and familiarise yourself with an example of how AI is already changing our relationship with animals - for good or bad. You can post a link below or write some bullets, but be ready to share your example with the group in our session.
Your answer
Exercise 2 of 2: Try a thought-experiment. If you could solve one major animal welfare or animal protection issue using AI, what would it be? Try and take on the following questions in the course of your answer:
Your answer is only seen by our teaching staff. If you'd like to make your answer public for fellow participants to discuss you can paste it in the comment section below.
Week Two: Diving deep into precision livestock farming (Pilot Session 2/2)
Learning Objectives
It's worth noting that S-risk Fundamentals will in its full form be a 12 week course . In this second pilot session, we’ll skip forward a few weeks through the full program and dive deep into a particularly salient application of AI technology (as per our feedback from pilot session one): precision livestock farming (PLF) or “smart” animal farming.
Learning objectives
By the end of this session, you'll be able to
Foundational Resources (total = 41:32 audio, 37min reading)
On the whole, will PLF increase or decrease animal suffering? The first two readings, respectively, offer optimist & pessimist perspectives on this question, and set us up nicely for the debate we'll have during the session.
Optional resources
These additional readings offer further background on this course session. Try and jump into at least one that appeals.
Pre-Session Exercises
Please spend 15-20 minutes responding to the following prompts before our session. Ideally you'll submit 24 hours before the session, which gives us a chance to have a look at your responses.
Abolition Now?
Is it more impactful to work towards the abolition of factory farming in general, rather than trying to steer the development & regulation of PLF? Take some time to write down arguments and feelings either way.
Your answer
Farming Risk Register. Choose one of the risks discussed in the Tuyttens paper: . Assess its scale, severity, & tractability in the way we did for AI and Animal welfare innovations in the previous session. Also don't forget to make a note of any uncertainties you encounter when assessing for any of the three factors.
Your answer
Whose welfare are we talking about, anyway? It's a big question: that which is tracked by PLF devices and measured as 'animal welfare' may not actually correspond with what's good for animals at all. How exactly such welfare is defined & measured makes all the difference.
Based on your reading, write down some of the bad things that could happen to different farmed animals if that which we currently measure and define as welfare is not good for these animals at all. How AI might exacerbate such 'suffering risks'? How might we reduce them?
Your answer
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