TechTakes

Very good read, but throughout I can't help but say to myself "ye so the issue is scale. AS ALWAYS"

This is a tale as old as time. Fusion energy is here! Quantum computers will revolutionise the world! Lab-grown meat! All based on actual scientific experiments and progress, but tiny, one-shot experiments under best-case conditions. There is no reason to think it brings us closer to a future where those are commonplace, except for a very nebulous technical meaning of "closer" as "yes, time has passed". There is no reason to think this would ever scale in any way! Like, there is a chance that e.g. fusion energy at any meaningful scale is just... impossible? Like, physically impossible to do. Or a stable quantum computer able to run Doom. Or lab-grown meat on a supermarket shelf. Every software engineer should understand this, we know there are ideas that work only when they're in a limited setting (number of threads, connections, size of input, whatever).

The media is always terrible at communicating this. Science isn't fucking magic, the fact that scientists were able to put one more qubit into their quantum computer means literally nothing to you, because the answer to "when will we have personal quantum computers" is "what? how did you get into my lab?". We have no idea. 50 years? 100 years? 1000 years? Likely never? Which number can I pull out of my ass for you to fuck off and let me do my research in peace? Of course, science is amazing, reading about those experiments is extremely interesting and cool as all fuck, but for some fucking reason the immediate reaction of the general public is "great, how quickly can we put a pricemark on it".

And this leads to this zeitgeist where the next great "breakthrough" is just around the corner and is going to save us all. AI will fix the job market! Carbon capture will fix climate change! Terraforming Mars will solve everything! Sit the fuck down and grow up, this is not how anything works. I don't even know where this idea of "breakthroughs" comes from, the scientific process isn't an action movie with three acts and a climax, who told you that? What even was the last technological "breakthrough"? Transistors were invented like 70yrs ago, but it wasn't an immediate breakthrough, it required like 40yrs of work on improving vacuum tubes to get there. And that was based on a shitton of work on electric theory from the XIX century. It was a slow process of incremental scientific discoveries across nations and people, which culminated in you having an iPhone 200 years later. And that's at least based on something we can actually easily observe in the natural world (and, funnily enough, we still don't have a comprehensive theory of how lightning storms even form on Earth). With fusion you're talking about replicating the heart of a star here on Earth, with lab grown meat you're talking about growing flesh in defiance of gods, and you think it's an overnight thing where you'll wake up tomorrow and suddenly bam we just have cold fusion and hot artificial chicken?

I hate how everyone seems to be addicted to, I don't know, just speed as a concept? Things have to be now, news is only good if it arrives to me breaking in 5 minutes, science is only good if it's just around the corner, a product is only good if it gets one billion users in a month. Just calm the fuck down. When was the last time you smelt the roses?

If you keep running through life all the roses are gonna burn down before you realise.

The riff-raff have brought us a graft grift.

Techbros: “I’m hungry for that Lab Grown Meat!”

Labs:

count another yay for how magic tech could (meaning: won't) solve major problem without people using it being inconvenienced in any way (giving up meat)

"Friedrich argued that investor buy-in was the de facto proof that cultivated meat has legs. Major meatpackers, prominent venture capital firms, the government of Singapore: You could trust that these stakeholders had done their due diligence, and they wanted in."

Ow god it is a scam. This was a reaction to researchers saying "we dont see it".

Great article.

I have long suspected that it was a dead end, because at most you get a slurry that you then have to process. We already have that, the slurry is just made of vegetables. Growing animal cells in a way is way more complex then mashing peas or beans and make processed food from that.

Or you know, be unafraid to try tofu.

I just want to have a chance to get some for myself even if it's super over priced I'll go for it, my whole life meat has been my favorite type of food, either gmo me a plant that can make fat and gristle or I'm stuck with lab grown stuff

I just want a non destructive way to enjoy my favourite thing

tired: lab grown meat

wired: worm filet mignon

hired: eat the rich

Man I don't need to be reminded of the sorry state of meat alternatives.

It's bitterly funny to me that fashoid governments started banning cultivated meat as if the economic and technical issues weren't enough. Ignorants terrified of threats they made up in their head as always.

It's very easy, just eat vegetables.

carbon capture you can eat

I eat very little meat these days, and I'd be happy to have lab-grown as an option. Even if it's more expensive and not produced at the same scale

In short, lab-grown cannot realistically replace a significant portion of the meat industry, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it's far too expensive and doesn't scale well because so much active machinery is required at each step in the manufacturing process. There are also issues regarding infected vats and if the cells' nutrition compares to that of natural meat.

At least it's possible in theory? I'm glad we're that far. But it clearly isn't going to happen at a large enough scale for lab-grown meat to start appearing at grocery stores.

In many people's minds lab-grown meat is a fact, and a reason to condemn everybody who isn't eating it. It has become a belief system - like thinking Tesla invented all of modern technology. If the companies disappear because investors got tired of flushing money down them, the default reason will be a conspiracy engineered by evil meat lords.

i had a bit of hope that this "cellular agriculture" from luigi's twitter would be growing hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria or something of that nature, but no it's a bad grift

Ahh I remember this article, it removed my illusions about lab grown meat. Thanks for bringing it back

Dammit. Is there another link?

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Indeed an amazing piece of journalism, a gripping read throughout! Thanks for the share.

Something this does lead me to wonder: the primary draw I usually have seen for lab grown meat is obtaining actual meat without animal suffering. (The article mentions theoretical environmental benefits if somehow perfected given the lack of need to produce unwanted parts of an animal, but given that any kind of processing of plant matter is going to be less efficient than eating the plants themselves, that seems like it can't really be the primary motivation). Do we actually need to culture cells to do that? Suppose we went the other way, instead of trying to, say, create chicken meat without the rest of the chicken, we were to take a chicken and try to redesign it so as to be unable to suffer, while keeping other useful properties (like an immune system, as the article brings up). Suffering requires a certain level of cognitive function, which requires a certain level of brain complexity and size. Chickens in industrial scale farms don't exactly utilize their cognitive abilities to the full, we barely even let them space to move to my understanding. So, what if we were to try to genetically engineer a chicken, or other livestock animal, with as little brains as possible while still being able to keep the thing alive, until the ethical issues of killing it were equivalent to those of something like a plant?