Upvoted for exploring the topic, but tempted to downvote for missing the most important and least discussed aspect of the change: population size.
The VAST majority of people living today would not only have had a worse standard of living pre-industrial-revolution, they would simply not exist at all. Unless you have a solid theory of marginal value of a life, other arguments are secondary.
It’s a trickier argument, because there’s less evidence that chickens consider their lives worth living, but on the whole, yes.
edit: don’t take this too far. I care about chickens a whole lot less than I care about humans, AND most chicken lives are closer to the line (and the error bars cross it) of “not worth living”. We’re nowhere near the repugnant conclusion line for humans, we might be for chickens. Fortunately for them, they remain delicious.
So synthetic meat, once it becomes technically feasible to do so and cheaper, would result in farm animal genocide. Since theoretically you could go directly between photosynthetic plants like algae → purified nutrients → growth media for synthetic meat → synthetic meat.
This would at scale be far more efficient.
The only remaining cows and chickens would be as pets, zoo animals, and for exotic restaurant fair.
I would expect that over time eating real meat would be frowned upon like how eating dog is becoming socially less acceptable even in countries that still do it.
Yes? This seems like a net good. Cows and chickens are like Cauliflower in that they need a very specific and controlled environment to produce market level produce.
Genocide seems like the wrong word here. If you understand it as removing a group of genes, then you’re correct. If you mean it as the large scale butchering of a group, then that’s sort of the whole point of farming them?
If you believe these animals are somewhat sentient with worthwhile individual qualia, then the consequences of cheap and perfect synthetic meat would be a reduction in number to less than 1 percent the current population.
So given those assumptions it’s genocide. I am not saying I believe they are sentient but presumably once we invent “neural debuggers” we will be able to answer this.
(Perfect synthetic meat: a close enough substitute that blind A:B testing cannot distinguish the difference. Neural debugger: technology to connect trillions of wires, either physically or though light, all throughout a running meat brain so that it’s functions can be fully analyzed and understood.)
Upvoted for exploring the topic, but tempted to downvote for missing the most important and least discussed aspect of the change: population size.
The VAST majority of people living today would not only have had a worse standard of living pre-industrial-revolution, they would simply not exist at all. Unless you have a solid theory of marginal value of a life, other arguments are secondary.
The vast majority of chicken would not have existed but for the meat industry. Would you accept that argument?
It’s a trickier argument, because there’s less evidence that chickens consider their lives worth living, but on the whole, yes.
edit: don’t take this too far. I care about chickens a whole lot less than I care about humans, AND most chicken lives are closer to the line (and the error bars cross it) of “not worth living”. We’re nowhere near the repugnant conclusion line for humans, we might be for chickens. Fortunately for them, they remain delicious.
So synthetic meat, once it becomes technically feasible to do so and cheaper, would result in farm animal genocide. Since theoretically you could go directly between photosynthetic plants like algae → purified nutrients → growth media for synthetic meat → synthetic meat.
This would at scale be far more efficient.
The only remaining cows and chickens would be as pets, zoo animals, and for exotic restaurant fair.
I would expect that over time eating real meat would be frowned upon like how eating dog is becoming socially less acceptable even in countries that still do it.
Yes? This seems like a net good. Cows and chickens are like Cauliflower in that they need a very specific and controlled environment to produce market level produce.
Genocide seems like the wrong word here. If you understand it as removing a group of genes, then you’re correct. If you mean it as the large scale butchering of a group, then that’s sort of the whole point of farming them?
If you believe these animals are somewhat sentient with worthwhile individual qualia, then the consequences of cheap and perfect synthetic meat would be a reduction in number to less than 1 percent the current population.
So given those assumptions it’s genocide. I am not saying I believe they are sentient but presumably once we invent “neural debuggers” we will be able to answer this.
(Perfect synthetic meat: a close enough substitute that blind A:B testing cannot distinguish the difference. Neural debugger: technology to connect trillions of wires, either physically or though light, all throughout a running meat brain so that it’s functions can be fully analyzed and understood.)