Evolution25 wrote: ↑May 22nd, 2021, 7:28 am
Why do we need wildlife animals or even insects?
Who is 'we' in your question? If it is only humans, then you are tacitly assuming that the only test of whether something matters is whether it matters to humans. But since the lives of many other animals may well have value to those animals themselves, this assumption is probably false.
What if we just destroy their habitats and make way for more houses, roads, gas pipelines etc. since that will advance human civilization further.
Well, again you are making the assumption that only human civilization matters. Does it matter to the lion in Africa? To the bear in North America? To the whale in the ocean? And yet these are sentient creatures to whom it matters that they live and are able to find food, procreate, and obtain whatever enjoyment they can from living. Beings to whom things matter, especially if they are affected by our actions, should be part of our circle of moral concern. The reason for this is that the fundamental value that qualifies anything to moral consideration is its ability to feel pleasure and pain. If you can hurt something by your actions, or if you can end its life and therein replace a net happy life with nothing, you are capable of doing evil to that being, and evil by definition is something we should not do.
So insects and animals contribute to our ecosystem example bees help with pollination of plants and crops, but can't we just rely on AI and robots in the future like artificial pollinators?
Suppose we replace animals with AI robots. Do those robots experience pleasure and pain? If they do, then we ought to bring them into our circle of moral consideration, and treat them as ends rather than just means. If they don't, then they should not be brought into the circle, and should be treated only as means, not ends. So a major moral decision will need to be made, depending on whether these robots can experience pleasure and pain. But how are we going to find out whether or not they do? We can't go by the way they behave; if they seem to show pleasure and pain, we can't know whether they really do feel these things, or whether their behaviour is just the result of clever programming. We can't work it out from their internal construction, as we could with an animal whose brain and central nervous system is made of the same stuff as ours, because we build robots from different stuff. So we will have ended the lives of other species about whose inner lives we can make an informed guess, and replaced them with beings about whose inner lives we can know nothing. This might be a morally defensible thing to do if wildlife animals generally had miserable lives, but looking around, I don't see that this is the case. Of course their lives are precarious, but in general, as long as they get enough to eat and have a habitat in which they can follow the kind of behaviour they are adapted for, it seems to me that most of them are likely to have lives that, on balance, are fairly enjoyable. So replacing them with robots would be replacing lives that have a net positive level of pleasure with existences whose pleasure level is entirely unknown, and this cannot be a morally justifiable thing to do.
And in the future we can build artificial trees that will suck in co2 in the air. Do you think we will slowly eliminate all wildlife?
Quite possibly.
And why shouldn't we?
Mainly for the reason I've given, but there is another reason, which is that everything humans build sooner or later breaks down. The biosphere has kept going for 3.77 billion years. If we replaced it with something made by humans, we'd be lucky if it was still working in 300 years. Even if it was made in China.
Philosophy is a waste of time. But then, so is most of life.