Thanks for this post. I thought it was really interesting and I think you are probably right.
My main objection—however—would be that technologies developed by welfarists would struggle to compete in the market as it stands because we’d be trying to meet the often competing demands of improving welfare and improving economic outcomes for farmers (in order to have our tech adopted in the first place).
Companies that develop technologies that are purely delivering efficiency gains for farms are more likely to succeed in a profit focused market than these welfarist technologies and so welfarist animal tech companies might be competed out of the market.
It might be more efficient to focus our attention on creating the kinds of market conditions that incentivise profit-making companies to develop the tech we want to see.
What this means is focusing on what we’re already doing—corporate campaigning, lobbying etc. - to create the conditions where farms/food companies have to care about animal welfare to some extend and then let the profit-seeking (counterfactually cheaper) money be spent on R&D to deliver the tech that meets those objectives.
Thanks for this post. I thought it was really interesting and I think you are probably right.
My main objection—however—would be that technologies developed by welfarists would struggle to compete in the market as it stands because we’d be trying to meet the often competing demands of improving welfare and improving economic outcomes for farmers (in order to have our tech adopted in the first place).
Companies that develop technologies that are purely delivering efficiency gains for farms are more likely to succeed in a profit focused market than these welfarist technologies and so welfarist animal tech companies might be competed out of the market.
It might be more efficient to focus our attention on creating the kinds of market conditions that incentivise profit-making companies to develop the tech we want to see.
What this means is focusing on what we’re already doing—corporate campaigning, lobbying etc. - to create the conditions where farms/food companies have to care about animal welfare to some extend and then let the profit-seeking (counterfactually cheaper) money be spent on R&D to deliver the tech that meets those objectives.