I believe it is entirely feasible to get the taste right. However, I don’t believe that is a major problem. Even in the worlds where it is very expensive to get the texture exactly right, we do what many cultures have done over time and between themselves: we modify it and get used to it. Foods and other less literal tastes being so varying between cultures and even age groups makes me optimistic that even failed replications of taste/texture could replace meat simply through a change in generation where children see it as merely another food option.
Though, admittedly, we are evolved to eat meat. This likely makes us more particular, yet we also prepare other foods like vegetables in exotic manners.
I don’t see why you think if it was about efficiency we would already have switched.
I’m somewhat confused: Current met production currently seems efficient based on people’s eating habits, desire for meat, expectations about what is healthy (various people don’t trust vegetarian answers for good and bad reasons), and most importantly our tech level.
Is your argument that the meat industry is getting enough subsidies that they aren’t truly more efficient than current alternatives? And/or that the government isn’t requiring to price in the externalities of their effects on the land or climate? If they are actually less cost-effective (in terms of food produced) without the effective subsidies, that would be interesting information to learn, but I’d be somewhat surprised. It would actually make me more optimistic about the state of alternatives to meat, though I also understand that it would be a mark against my theory.
(Just to be clear, I think transitioning will still take time. If we had gotten an instant win of better/cheaper/healthier alternatives back in 2015 without a slow buildup, that would have helped massively and things would have scaled up. I would expect a massive amount more beyond burger and such in stores by now, but I’d still expect meat for a while yet! Unfortunately we’re in the world where it has become a somewhat politically polarized topic, and it isn’t an obvious win to many consumers, which slows things down even if we had a definite better alternative available.)
I’m skeptical the meat industry survives in the current form. It is possible they drag out their existence for a long while, but since I expect cheaper more plentiful food from the artificial sources, that leads to a great method to out-compete them.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing against donating to animal welfare, but I do see donations in this area as mostly bringing the time the transition occurs closer in most possibilities. Still very much worthwhile! Cutting a decade into five years gives a lot of value, and even setting the stage for when great alternatives exist is valuable.
Throwing a number out as a weak model, I’d say that about 5-15% of worlds where the meat industry manipulates government to strongly rely on factory farming for a significantly long time. A decade? Two decades? Three? In the other possibilities, I expect factory farming to limp along but be shifted out at varying speeds. They would still try to stifle alternatives, but not be in a dominant position.
I think food companies are already interested in alternative meat products, which means you don’t have a full cartel. Even in the 5-15%, I expect the meat companies to inevitably adopt the technology themselves even if they’ve choked out all the competitors. Not having the competitors is still very much a problem given how long they would delay the change.
(Climate change, for example, is a harder problem because it requires more coordination and most people can’t just substitute electricity into their car. Food is a lot more of a substitutable good.)
Just to be clear, my intended belief there was a 5-15% of meat industry taking dominance for 2-3 decades after the introduction of an alternative that is very close or beats meat entirely.
Though I do think it is plausible the alternatives come soon, AI technology is advancing rapidly; and I don’t believe many people’s models are properly factoring in AI technology of our current level being applied to more areas, much less what we’ll have in the future after significant advancements.
Of course, EA tends to be a lot better at that than other charities.
As an example: Theorem proving is bottlenecked by the annoying but solvable triplet of: data, money to train larger models, and companies focusing on it. Scaling the current methods would hit noticeable limits due to planning/search being hard, but would allow a lot of automation towards proving software correct. AlphaProof itself is then a step above the methods that came before it. This could provide a good amount of value in terms of ensuring important software is correct but is generally ignored or assumed to need massive breakthroughs.
I find it plausible that more systems in the vein of AlphaFold (protein prediction, most centrally relevant to meat) can be extended to other areas of chemistry with a significant amount of time & effort to collect data and design. There’s big data collection problems here, we have a lot of data about food but it is more locked away inside companies and not as carefully researched to a low level as proteins.
I know the theorem proving better than I do the AlphaFold area, but that gets across my general view of “many mental models assume too much like we are in 2018 but with single isolated notable advancements like AlphaFold/AlphaProof/ChatGPT rather than a field with much to explore via permutations of those core ideas”.