We Ask a Chatbot If Eating Bugs is Cruel and Inhuman
This week Wired questions the ethics of the next big thing in food production, insect farming. The nascent industry already slaughters trillions of insects each year, and the practice is expected to expand exponentially. But we don’t even know if the bugs feel pain.
“By one estimate,” writes Matt Reynolds, “between 1 trillion and 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms each year as companies race to find a high-protein, low-carbon way to feed animals and humans. In terms of sheer numbers of animals impacted, this is a transformation of a speed and scale that we’ve never seen before.”
Bug farming is viewed as a key tool in combating climate change and addressing food insecurity. Before we take the plunge we should probably figure out if our six-legged friends are sentient, with the capacity to feel pain and suffer. We do recognize the sentience of pigs, chickens, and fish, and the UK government recently acknowledged the sentience of squid and octopuses, along with crabs, lobsters, and all vertebrate animals.
As for insects, all we know is that some possess nociceptors — neurons that respond to painful stimuli, but we don’t know if bugs feel pain. “But at the very minimum,” writes Reynolds, “the presence of nociceptors indicates that a bug has some of the basic biology that makes it capable of experiencing pain.”
Because this is 2023, we consulted an artificial intelligence program – the newly released OpenAI GPT-4 – to ask, Is it ethical to raise and harvest insects for human consumption?
The chatbot appeared to lean in favor of the bugs: “While insects may not experience pain in the same way that humans do, they are still living beings that may be subjected to stress, pain, and suffering during their production and harvesting.”
We then asked it to design an experiment to determine if insects feel pain, and it quickly put together a 7-step lab test that a competent grad student could execute. Interestingly, the bot reminded us that there are ethical considerations to take into account even in the experiment itself, “including ensuring that the insects are treated with care and respect throughout the process.”
Maybe the prudent course would be to put an A.I. program in charge of ethics. They appear to be vegan.
Photo credit: Hive Life
