Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard
🎯 Summary
Technology and Animal Welfare: Navigating the Future of Factory Farming
This podcast episode, featuring Lewis Ballard, Farm Animal Welfare Program Director at Open Philanthropy, provides a deep dive into the complex intersection of technology, economics, and animal welfare, specifically focusing on the future of factory farming. The central narrative explores whether emerging technologies, including Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), will solve the industry’s ethical problems, or if incremental, policy-driven interventions remain the most critical path forward.
Key Takeaways for Technology Professionals:
1. AGI is Not a Guaranteed Solution for Factory Farming: While AGI is expected to accelerate alternative protein development (like cultivated meat), Ballard cautions against relying on it to end factory farming. Significant cultural obstacles (consumer preference for “real meat”) and political obstacles (regulatory bans on cultivated meat in several US states and potential EU restrictions) mean that the current, highly efficient system could persist even after AGI arrives.
2. The Economic Efficiency of Factory Farming is the Core Challenge: The extreme low cost of factory-farmed chicken is rooted in evolutionary optimization and ruthless cost-cutting. Chickens have been optimized by evolution for efficient feed conversion ratio (FCR) (about 2:1 grain-to-meat). The industry has stripped away all costs associated with animal well-being, creating a price target that alternative proteins struggle to meet without massive technological breakthroughs or regulatory support.
3. The Dual Strategy: Moonshots vs. Incremental Reform: The discussion highlights a critical divergence in investment:
- Alternative Proteins (Moonshots): Attracting billions in VC funding, aiming to replace the entire paradigm (e.g., cultivated meat).
- Humane Technology (Incremental Reform): Receiving minimal funding (estimated at less than $10 million annually), focusing on improving conditions within existing factory farms (e.g., in ovo-sexing, better genetics). Ballard argues that while alternative proteins are necessary to meet growing global demand, humane technology is crucial for immediate, large-scale suffering reduction.
4. In Ovo-Sexing: A Case Study in Effective Technological Intervention: The adoption of in ovo-sexing—technology that scans eggs to identify and eliminate male embryos before hatching—is presented as a massive success. This technology, spurred by initial philanthropic/government seed funding ($10 million estimate), has already spared 200 million male chicks from being killed on day one (a practice affecting 8 billion chicks annually). This demonstrates that targeted, near-term technological applications can achieve massive welfare gains quickly.
5. Identifying Low-Hanging Fruit in Archaic Practices: Technologists are encouraged to look for archaic practices that persist because the industry prioritizes efficiency over welfare. Examples cited include:
- Castration of piglets using blunt knives without pain relief, which could be replaced by newer technologies like immunocastration.
- Breeding practices that prioritize rapid growth over animal robustness, leading to chronic pain (e.g., leg collapse in broiler chickens).
6. The Danger of Efficiency-Driven Cruelty: A recurring theme is that historical optimization for efficiency often leads to increased cruelty. When efficiency gains (like faster growth rates) are achieved, the industry often pushes the limits further, resulting in greater suffering (e.g., increased mortality rates despite technological advances). This dynamic necessitates external governance—government standards or corporate supply chain commitments—to establish a “welfare floor” that the industry cannot race beneath.
7. Shifting Activism from Personal Purity to Systemic Change: Ballard critiques the historical focus of the animal welfare movement on personal dietary choices (vegetarianism/veganism), arguing it led to an inward focus on “personal purity.” The movement is now shifting toward high-impact strategies like government reform and corporate policy change, which drive systemic improvements affecting billions of animals (e.g., EU welfare standards, McDonald’s cage-free commitment).
Strategic Implications:
For technology professionals, the episode underscores that the most impactful work in this sector may not be in developing the next paradigm-shifting protein, but in applying existing technological knowledge to solve specific, high-volume welfare problems within the current system. Success requires understanding the economics of commodity production and leveraging advocacy to ensure that technological improvements are adopted as welfare gains, rather than simply being exploited for further efficiency gains.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"And I think the reason they went out of business is because there is such huge mislabeling across the industry that it's very hard to separate out what's actually better."
"So oftentimes people who are doing pasture-based production have to create their entire supply chain by themselves. They literally have to build their own slaughterhouse and create their entire supply chain around that, which drives up costs massively."
"Most people don't realize that the way these factory farms are structured is you have these giant corporations like Tyson Foods or Smithfield. They mostly don't own their own farms. Instead, they have these contract farmers who are essentially indentured laborers."
"They appeal to this mythos of the American farmer. People think the American farmer is the good, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth person. They sell the image of this person out in the fields, tending to their chickens and their pigs. They don't realize these are factory farmers."
"The meat lobby spends on the order of $45 million in any given election cycle. And they seem to be able to have influence on the topics they care about, which would be astounding and make jealous all of us in tech."
"My sense of what the industry does is they get a whole bunch of their executives to max out on donations to politicians. The politicians then give their meetings. Right. And I wish this wasn't the way the system worked."