Hm, the post is good, though I see this as a relatively weak statement. The amount of factory farming would be massively lower than now, presuming that my assumptions about people switching off of meat are true.
I also expect that if we get a big boost of technology (even better AI-driven protein/chemical synthesis or discovery), then I don’t expect the argument that we’ll still farm them for dyes and such to hold. As the years go by, it becomes ever more feasible to synthesize those useful dyes or materials directly. The outcome described there would still be a lot less (several orders of magnitude?) factory farming. I do think this point depends notably on how soon you think the technology will occur and solve a lot of the general problem (getting chemicals/proteins en masse). I find it plausible that it will come before we solve various meat alternatives (in the better or equivalent price/taste/cost/nutrition sense), but also find it mildly plausible that it takes a decade or two after.
Point three of the article that AI will make factory farming more efficient is true, but also I don’t have a reason to believe the final conclusion. Big data analytics does not provide notable evidence to believe that factory farming will outcompete alternative methods in the long run—it is an argument that they aren’t constant and so have a longer shelf-life than the naive extrapolation. Growing an animal simply requires a lot of work and energy in a specific form that I don’t have any reason to believe alternative meats require as much. As for the bioengineering example, a similar argument implies. To me, this is like saying that a person down in a mine is always going to be more efficient and scalable than a digging machine.
Point four is one that I think fills out a difference in vision. They compare it to chocolate which hasn’t been replaced. My model of the world is that over the next thirty or so years we have significant advancement in fields like chemical synthesis, reverse engineering proteins, and so on. I don’t see any reason to believe chocolate won’t be replaced! Many of the foods made from it alter the taste massively themselves, if food companies could replace chocolate with a significantly cheaper version then they would. I believe they would be slower about it, it presumably doesn’t cost much and has been quite tuned.
It feels like there’s a missing note in the post, that they think things will stay comparatively the same as 2020 level competitiveness even though there’s very little reason to believe that. Why should I think that growing a full animal is remotely efficient for any of our needs?
There are some good points or areas to think about, and the weakest claim that there might be a notable amount of factory farming is true, but I feel overall a bit baffled by the thrust of the article. There’s a missing note to the post, a strong background assumption that technology will continue looking as it is circa 2020 with no major optimizations feasible. AI isn’t an integral part of my point, though I believe if it succeeds as it has so far then the timescale for various synthesis methods and the like moves up quite a lot, so I don’t view that quite as the distinction.
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.)