Can Cultivated Meat Take Off Before the Inevitable Tech Backlash?

I recently saw a software developer boasting on social media about his new artificial-intelligence program which allowed users to convincingly swap the face of one person onto another in a live video, employing a single photograph as a reference. When commenters asked what use this might have outside of financial scams or deep-fake pornography, the developer essentially shrugged his shoulders.

The response appears to have been so severe the developer has since deleted his post. Now, I’m sure there might be some productive use for the technology, but none immediately comes to mind, while a host of anti-social behavior does. I worry this sort of Silicon Valley nihilism will create a larger backlash against all technological development, including that which could genuinely make the world better.

For example, I’m a strong proponent of cultivated meat. If you are unfamiliar with the term, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It provides a potential solution to a number of seemingly intractable problems. I’m specifically talking about the animal-welfare, public-health and environmental costs of our food system, which are enormous, when you begin to consider them.

The successful commercialization of cultivated meat would help reduce the number of aquatic and land animals we kill every year for consumption, which conservative estimates place at over a trillion. The amount of suffering this represents is almost impossible to imagine. To put it in a little perspective, only about 117 billion humans have ever lived, according to the Population Reference Bureau.

The more cellular agriculture replaces livestock farming, the more we would lower the risk of zoonotic diseases making the jump to our species and causing another global pandemic. For instance, experts are terrified avian flu, which appears to have begun spreading among humans, will do this. Since animals are removed from the process, cultivated meat would significantly decrease concern.

Finally, many people aren’t aware that animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of climate change. Scientists hope eventually cultivated meat will require a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions that raising and slaughtering livestock does. My understanding is there is very little reason to think this won’t ultimately be the case, but, of course, the technology is still being developed.

So cultivated meat offers a wide variety of potential benefits. My worry is unscrupulous actors in Silicon Valley will so alienate the general population that public and private funding for cellular-agriculture research will dry up even more than it already has. If the general population only sees examples of new technologies making the world worse, it’s hard not to believe such a backlash is inevitable.

In my view, cultivated meat will be commercialized at some point, but there’s a decent chance a widespread backlash against technological development could significantly delay the milestone. I’d like to believe Silicon Valley leaders could exercise some self-restraint, if only to protect their long-term self interest, but, as a socialist, I’m not sure if that’s possible for these capitalists, which is a profound shame.

The post Can Cultivated Meat Take Off Before the Inevitable Tech Backlash? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.