Hey readers,

Dylan here. You might have missed it amid all the other drama of the 2024 election — one of the presidential candidates was almost assassinated, and that wasn’t even the most shocking thing to happen — but one of the biggest political stories last year was the emergence of crypto as a major electoral player.

Fairshake PAC, a super PAC funded with $160 million from crypto firms like Coinbase and Ripple, spent gargantuan sums to defeat Democratic candidates it viewed as implacably hostile to cryptocurrency (friendly Dems got help; no Republicans were targeted in general elections). We’ll never know for sure whether their massive investments against Katie Porter in California and Sherrod Brown in Ohio cost them their Senate races, but it certainly contributed to their defeats.

Those losses sent a clear message: If you turn against crypto, it can and will defeat you at the ballot box. Legislators heard. Tim Scott, the Republican chair of the Senate Banking Committee, told a crypto conference recently, “Literally, the [crypto] industry put Bernie Moreno in the Senate” — Moreno being Sherrod Brown’s victorious Republican opponent.

Crypto firms can do this, because they have a lot of money. But you know who might have even more money? AI companies. So, it’s probably a big deal that OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman and the VC firm Andreesen Horowitz have each kicked in $50 million for a new super PAC, called Leading the Future, meant to intervene on behalf of the AI sector. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Meta California, funded by the Facebook/Instagram parent company, is another $100 million super PAC advocating for the AI sector, per a report from the New York Times’ Teddy Schleifer (who you may remember from his occasional reporting for Vox back in the day) and Eli Tan.

AI policy researcher Daniel Eth has a nice thread laying out what happened in crypto and what the decision to run the same playbook on AI could mean. “Unless something changes,” he concluded, “we should expect the AI industry will achieve similar political dominance as crypto. This would mean freezing the progress of AI regulatory proposals in Congress, w/ most elected officials becoming nervous to even criticize the industry.”

At the same time, I agree with this point later in his thread: “If an issue is super high salience to voters, such that many will actually change their votes based on it (eg immigration, abortion, maybe climate change in a Dem primary), then politicians will be wise to align with voters, even if that irritates their donors.” The crypto play worked because the vast majority of Americans don’t care about the issue at all — fewer than 15 percent of Americans own crypto, according to one recent survey, while another found that only 2 percent say they “regularly” trade crypto —  and indifferent voters are easier to persuade than already-passionate ones.

But if AI transforms our economic and cultural life profoundly enough that it becomes a first-order issue like abortion or immigration, the calculus changes, and countervailing pressures to rail against this inhuman force disrupting our society could become more important to politicians than the AI firms’ money.

Killing two people is worse than killing one. What about 440 billion crustaceans?

Any ideology, pushed far enough, can take people to some pretty strange places. That includes even the seemingly obvious premise that we should maximize the good and minimize the harm to as many individuals as possible, an idea that forms the bedrock of the deeply math-y effective altruism movement. Human beings, it turns out, cause their fellow creatures an enormous amount of pain and suffering, so much that taking it seriously might lead you to conclude that the most important moral crisis in the world is *checks notes* shrimp welfare.

Why? It comes down to the degree of suffering multiplied by the scale of suffering: We treat those tiny crustaceans abysmally, and we slaughter them in the hundreds of billions every year. 

In this feature, Future Perfect's Dylan Matthews, himself an effective altruist who takes the accounting of suffering more seriously than most, wrestles with what the plight of crustaceans might mean for his worldview. Quantifying moral problems undoubtedly matters — I've been on the record many times claiming humanity's mass torture of farmed animals as one of the greatest crimes of our time. But the case of the shrimp also shows us the limits of reducing ethics to a math problem. 

This piece is the first in a Future Perfect series about the sea creatures we farm for food. The stories in these series are generously supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare. Look out for more throughout the fall! —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor

Senior editorial director Bryan Walsh and deputy editor Izzie Ramirez argue whether robot fight club is dystopian or not.

Dystopia:

OR

Not:        

with Shayna Korol

Title: Future Perfect Fellow
What I cover: emerging science and tech, societal risks, diseases and how we treat them
What I’m working out to: this 30-minute Tai Chi video that’s harder than it looks

Forget Snakes on a Plane. On Monday, an IndiGo Airlines flight from Kanpur to Delhi was delayed by three hours, because a rat somehow made its way into the cabin. All passengers were evacuated while the crew searched the plane, re-boarding only after the stowaway was removed.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a rat on a plane, and it won’t be the last. In 2018, an Alaska Airlines flight from Oakland to Portland was canceled after a rat made its way aboard. The airline took the plane out of service until an exterminator gave the all-clear. The year before, passengers on a flight from Miami to Berlin found a rat while in the air. It may have been on the aircraft since before the plane left from Dubai. The unlucky rat was captured and handed over to German scientists, who dissected the stowaway and analyzed its tissues for a variety of pathogens to see how easily they could spread around the globe.

The results were published in Scientific Reports last month. The researchers didn’t find any of the worst rat-borne pathogens like hantaviruses or the literal plague, meaning that passengers and crew faced little infection risk. But they did find a bacterial strain that was nearly identical to human variants, which could indicate that it was passed back and forth between rats and humans. The German scientists also found several opportunistic pathogens, which are usually harmless but can cause disease in immunocompromised people and animals. As a bonus, though, they also discovered four new viral genome segments of the Picobrinaviridae family of viruses.

In the past, rats crossed oceans by scurrying onto ships. With the advent of air travel, they can travel from Dubai to Miami to Berlin in less than a day, potentially bringing their pathogens to three continents. 

Studying plane rats (hopefully not plane plague rats) can help us better understand the state of global health and disease. The Scientific Reports paper offers the first-ever blueprint for handling stowaway animals aboard airplanes. The study authors recommend a workflow for comprehensive pathogen screening, and in the event of an emergency finding like the presence of hantavirus, outline public health measures that should be taken immediately. While nothing truly terrible came of these particular plane rats, we might not be so lucky the next time we find rats on a plane.

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