And workers, consumers, and taxpayers.

We already needed to to do that anyway. In either case the share of electricity from low-carbon sources is steadily increasing, driven primarily by renewables. At the moment about 90% of new capacity is just solar and wind. Which are also very fast to deploy. Yes, I know, this is Reddit, so "what about nuclear?" We've heard of it. New nuclear is too expensive and slow to deploy.

Because the feedstock for the cultured meat comes from plants. Eating plants is going to be more efficient than using plants as feedstock and using energy to turn that feedstock into meat. Cultured meat will be more efficient than raising the whole animal, but it can't be more efficient than its own feedstock.

There is one way cultured meat could be more efficient, but I think it's a ways off. Companies like Solar Foods and Air Protein are using hydrogenotrophs to make proteins and carbohydrates from CO2, with no need for plants as input. So zero need for arable land. The process will still need energy, but on every other metric I think it'll be more efficient than even plants. And per Jim Mellon's book Moo's Law, they'll be able to make feedstock for cultured meat as well. But neither of these companies are to market yet. It'll be interesting to watch play out.

It's interesting that I saw it argued for years that to advocate for any but the cheapest energy was to advocate for poverty, for people to literally starve. That switched very quickly, around a decade ago, when solar and wind became economically competitive. Suddenly the whole conversation shifted away from economics to land use.

Land use arguments are hinky, because they don't take into account the fact that, with renewables, land can be used for multiple things simultaneously. PV can coexist with wind, and also with crops via agrivoltaics. Offshore wind is also expanding rapidly. PV can also go on rooftops, over canals and reservoirs, etc.

And the US has a lot of land. Since 2000 the US reduced farmland by 5%. That alone is ~50 million acres, or 78125 miles^2. That alone, if used for PV (or crops+PV, via algrovoltaics), would provide the current US electricity demand almost 8x over. And even that ignores wind, rooftop solar, hydro, etc. Obviously what's best for the US might not work for, say, Singapore, but there's a lot of land out there.

Sustainable compared to what? Cultured meat is less sustainable or environmentally friendly than just eating plants, but vastly more sustainable than conventional meat production.

Is a steakhouse sustainable? A BBQ joint? A churrascaria? Not really, not at scale. But moving to cultured meat, as the technology and prices improve, will make meat production vastly more sustainable. It will reduce the land and water use of meat production, reduce the need for antibiotics, reduce agricultural runoff, plus of course reduce animal suffering.

• Chemical safety benefits of cultured meat
• Food safety benefits of cultured meat

I suspect companies will be quite willing to label and market their meat as being lab-grown, i.e. not slaughtered. No chance of fecal contamination, to name just one problem with conventional, slaughtered meat. I suspect "guaranteed shit-free meat" will be more marketable than "just make sure you wash it to get all the e.coli (i.e. feces) out, and it's totally fine" meat we're used to.

You can tailor the feedstock to any nutritional profile you like. They won't be growing the whole chicken, because they have no use of the GI tract, eyes, feathers, etc. This is why cultured meat has such a higher feed conversion ratio, meaning higher efficiency.

And politicians saber-rattling over national pride. But even chimps go to war. That doesn't mean that therefore we should go to war too, just that it wasn't invented by a businessman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

> What extra labor are you talking about?

The book itself talked about how labor-intensive some of the processes were. Not amenable to automation. I'm not asserting it's more labor-intensive, rather the book mentioned that several times. I only got halfway through it though. I felt it was talking either about shifts that were already happening (no till, cover crops, etc), or that wouldn't scale.

Unfortunately most of the methods he wrote about were very labor-intensive. Those guys rarely get a day off, and it has to be a work of passion for them. I don't see that scaling.

Most people mean they'd putter around so long as it was amusing. They'd never want to have to survive that way. They're mistaking a hobby garden for a farm.

This assumes that measures could successfully raise the fertility rate above the replacement rate. Other than hypotheticals like 'pay parents a billion dollars' or something that can't scale, I think it's going to be challenging. Even with paid leave, subsidized childcare, whatever, children are still an opportunity cost. They undercut free time, money, options, etc. And every additional child reduces the time/focus/hugs that can be given to the first child. Our expectations go up with wealth, to include our expected quality of parenting time, number of extracurricular or developmental activities for the child, and so on.

I think people want to think that if only we improve the world then birthrates will bounce upwards a significant amount. But there's scant data that supports that. High birthrates correlate with dystopian conditions, such as lower levels of education, less empowerment for women, less access to birth control, higher infant mortality, and so on. Give women options, and more women choose to have fewer (or no) children, and more choose to prioritize careers. It doesn't seem to actually be the case that women as a mass want to be stay-at-home tradwives with a passel of children, and are working only because they're forced to by economics.

Another concern is that people seem to think that if you say that improving the world won't increase the birthrate, then you are by implication saying don't improve the world. I'm not, at all. I want to improve the world, on all of these measures, even if they result in a lower birthrate.

> Only the Utopian society survives, as the dystopian societies collapse and die off.

Or the Utopian society also dies off, due to low fertility rates. By all indications better conditions tend to correlate with lower fertility rates. It sometimes bounces back from its nadir, but usually stabilizes somewhere around 1.7, well below replacement rate.

We're very focused on dystopia or disaster killing people off. I suppose because a great amount of our science fiction and other speculative literature explores that idea. But prosperity and high (enough) quality of life lowering fertility rates below the fertility rates was something no one saw coming. It "doesn't make sense," in that it doesn't fit with our intuition of how the world should work.

There are some wildcards that will throw off predictions.

1. Dropping fertility rates. The world is very close to dropping below the replacement rate. Even for Nigeria and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, every iterative population estimate for 2100 gets significantly lower. Predictions for Nigeria went from >900 million to ~500 million in ten years. Every time they look, they find that the fertility rate is dropping faster than they anticipated. And the drivers of the decline in fertility are generally good things, not bad. Education for girls and women, prosperity, human rights, access to birth control, etc.
2. Cellular agriculture, including but not limited to cultured meat. Other companies are working on dairy, wool, leather, seafood, cotton, even chocolate and coffee. Companies like Solar Foods and Air Protein have made analogues of flour, and plant oils, and can even make growth media for cultured meat, all with zero arable land. Cellular agriculture is going to be a boon environmentally, but is going to be economically complicated. It's going to hit rural, poorer regions hard. This works hand-in-hand with controlled-environment agriculture, which also uses ~90% less land, water, etc.
3. The ongoing shift from fossil fuels. A collapse of Russia, S. Arabia, and other petrostates could have knock-on effects that are harmful to the rest of the world too. Petrostates won't just calmly go away, rather the chaos caused by their financial collapse will send out shockwaves.

So by 2100 we could be living in a dramatically better world, or technological civilization could have collapsed, or runaway climate change could have killed most of us of, or... who knows. Even just the fertility rate issue throws huge error bars onto any predictions. Technological civilization needs scientists, engineers, workers, etc. Exponential decay in the population can be an existential threat, no less than exponential growth.

> Any alternative will be more damaging than palm oil.

Interesting coverage of that here, with some data.

https://ourworldindata.org/palm-oil#palm-oil-versus-the-alternatives

People love nature but don't want to give up low-density living, or stop eating beef. Though the latter is the larger issue by far, since we use 50x more land for agriculture than we do for all cities and towns. And 3/4 of agricultural land we use is to pasture animals we eat or grow food to feed them. So agricultural sprawl is a large part of the loss of biodiversity. Eating plants is much more land-efficient (and water-efficient), but people ain't giving up their beef burgers and steaks for anything.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

The Turing test consisted of more than merely saying yes to the question. The AI has to convince a person they're conscious. So it's more about what we're willing to call conscious than it is about the IQ of the machine.

Another metric people have used is the ability of the machine to talk its way out of a box, wiggle out from under human control. The movie Ex Machina was an interesting exploration of that idea. Being embodied in a body, with a face, that triggers protective instincts or lust or other convenient, manipulable emotions from humans would be conducive to getting out from under human control.