Brian Tomasik

Brian Tomasik (/tʌˈmɑːsɪk/ tuh-MAH-sick) is an American researcher, ethicist, and essayist. He is known for his work on wild animal suffering, suffering-focused ethics, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He previously sometimes wrote under the name Alan Dawrst, a pseudonym he no longer uses. A proponent of consent-based negative utilitarianism, he has written extensively on the welfare and moral consideration of invertebrates such as insects, as well as on artificial sentience and reinforcement learning agents. He co-founded the non-profit Center on Long-Term Risk (formerly the Foundational Research Institute) and is affiliated with the effective altruism movement. He is the creator of the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, on which he has published over a hundred essays on ethics, consciousness, and strategies for reducing suffering in biological and artificial systems.

Tomasik's 2009 essay "The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering" has been cited in discussions of the topic and as an early contribution to efforts to present it as a significant moral issue. He supports interventions aimed at reducing suffering in nature, including habitat destruction and gene editing, while warning about suffering risks posed by technologies such as terraforming, directed panspermia, and large-scale computer simulations. He argues against entomophagy and the consumption of bivalves, citing concerns about potential suffering and the large numbers of animals involved. Tomasik advocates evidence-based reasoning, cost-effectiveness, and long-term impact in ethical decision-making. In his writings on consciousness, he treats it as a constructed and morally relevant concept, rejecting metaphysical notions such as qualia and the hard problem of consciousness.