animal ethics

Gary Yourofsky's 2010 lecture at Georgia Tech arguing for veganism on ethical, health and environmental grounds. It is a long, forceful animal-rights speech.

Patricia Aas's EuroBSDCon keynote is about ethics for people who build software, covering how the tech industry got to its current state and what engineers can do about it. It steps back from technical detail to the bigger picture.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on meat: why people love it and what it costs animals, the environment and health. It lays out the complicated trade-offs of meat production and consumption.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

A BBC Weird Nature clip about vervet monkeys in the Caribbean that drink alcohol, and how they split into heavy drinkers, social drinkers and teetotalers.

A reading of David Foster Wallace's essay Consider the Lobster, about the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival and the ethics of boiling lobsters alive. The reading runs about 50 minutes.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.

Frans de Waal's TED talk shows videos of behavioral experiments on primates and other mammals that reveal empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. He argues these moral traits are not uniquely human.

CGP Grey explains why horses could be ridden and why other animals like zebras and bears were never domesticated for war or riding. It is a follow-up on the topic of animal domestication.

A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.

A Kurzgesagt video on the conditions in which most farm animals are raised. It argues that cruelty is for cheaper rather than better meat, and that a small price increase per meal could avoid most of the suffering.

Social psychologist Melanie Joy introduces the concept of carnism, the belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others.

A long video essay arguing that Koko the gorilla probably could not actually use sign language. It examines the cherry-picked data and the lack of transparency behind the claims, drawing on published critiques.

A one-minute clip of a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof on a small lid, apparently just for fun.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

Chris Stucchio presents the ethical principles behind algorithmic decision making and shows with examples from lending, criminology and education that they cannot all be satisfied at once. The talk frames AI fairness as a set of quantitative tradeoffs.

A one-minute clip from a cat cafe in Japan where sleeping cats wake and look around just before an earthquake begins shaking the room.

A short Discovery nature clip from North America showing a red fox listening for field mice under the snow and then diving headfirst to catch them. The narration says the fox uses its hearing and the Earth's magnetic field to aim its jump.

The Good Will Hunting scene in which Will explains to NSA recruiters why he would not work for them. It is a monologue on the ethics of national security work.

A short demonstration of a crow using a purpose-built vending machine, in which the bird exchanges objects for rewards. The creator sells the machine as a kit.

AvE tears down a broken Dyson Animal vacuum and its expensive replacement, criticizing the molded plastic, flimsy switches and overall engineering, with his usual profane commentary.

A one-minute clip of the New Caledonian crow Betty bending a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube. It comes from a 2002 Science study on tool-making in crows.

A video by expat YouTuber serpentza about animal-eating practices and hygiene in China, presented as showing what the country's authorities do not want seen.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on language, comparing human and animal communication, ape language projects like Koko and Kanzi, and how language is acquired. It is part of his human behavioral biology course.

A podcast episode of Arrested DevOps with Andrew Clay Shafer and Bryan Cantrill, featuring Cantrill's rant on integrity in companies and technology.

Yannic Kilcher explains how he trained a language model on three years of 4chan's /pol/ board and let it post on the site. He evaluates how good the model was and discusses the ethics and fallout.

A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.

Tom Lehrer's satirical song about Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who went from the Nazi missile program to the US space program. It includes the famous line about not caring where the rockets come down.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

Bloomberg Technology interviews Google engineer Blake Lemoine about the experiments that led him to believe LaMDA was sentient and why he was placed on administrative leave. He also raises concerns about AI ethics at Google.

A 2023 University of Toronto conversation between Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on responsible AI development. They look back at the history of deep learning and ImageNet and discuss the ethics and risks of AI.

A short BBC clip narrated by David Attenborough showing crows in Japan using city traffic to crack nuts, dropping them at intersections and retrieving them when the light changes.

The Pinkfong Baby Shark Dance children's song video, one of the most viewed videos on YouTube.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andrej Karpathy on why reinforcement learning is flawed, why AGI may blend into steady GDP growth, why self-driving took so long, and the future of education. The conversation runs about two and a half hours.

A short clip from Animal House of Kevin Bacon's character at a fraternity paddling, saying 'Thank you sir, may I have another?'

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin)'s "Coding Better World Together" series. It makes the case for clean code and for treating software craftsmanship as an ethical and professional responsibility. It runs about 109 minutes.

Jonathan Blow's 2010 Rice University talk argues that game designers refine their techniques in ways that can manipulate players, as with A/B-tested social games. He discusses the ethical responsibility of designers and what games can offer beyond addiction.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

Vegan advocate Erin Janus explains the dairy industry in about five minutes, covering how milk is produced and the treatment of cows and calves. It is an advocacy piece and includes graphic material.