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[LINK] U.S. Views of Technology and the Future
I just found this on slashdot:
"U.S. Views of Technology and the Future - Science in the next 50 years" by the Pew Research Center
This report emerges from the Pew Research Center’s efforts to understand public attitudes about a variety of scientific and technological changes being discussed today. The time horizons of these technological advances span from today’s realities—for instance, the growing prevalence of drones—to more speculative matters such as the possibility of human control of the weather.
This is interesting esp. in comparison to the recent posts on forecasting which focussed on expert forecasts.
What I found most notable was the public opinion on their use of future technology:
% who would do the following if possible...
50% ride in a driverless car
26% use brain implant to improve memory or mental capacity
20% eat meat grown in a lab
Don't they know Eutopia is Scary? I'd guess if these technologies really become available and are reliable only the elderly will be inable to overcome their preconceptions. And everybody will eat artificial meat if it is cheaper, more healthy and tastes the same (and the testers say confirm this).
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Comments (15)
Answers for 1) and 3) mostly mean "I don't believe technology will ever reach that point, and I will not believe any claims about safety/quality/taste/any other that they will make for marketing purposes. " In many historical cases "like margarine vs butter" this approach was totally right, and it can be right for driverless cars and artificial meat.
For 2) , most people would not use even proven safe imlpants unless forced to do so, like "get that chip or lose your job". Thank sci-fi writers for that.
What do you mean with the term?
"Thing that one believes to work exactly as described and surely not to have harmful side effects".
That a quite clear category for mathematical proof, on the other hand humans are complex systems and there the halting problem with doesn't give you "surely" when it comes to understanding what a complex system does.
I don't really believe in growing meat in a lab. Why would you want to grow meat when you have yeast?
Vegan chefs manage to make good meat replacements with tofu. You might need to introduce a few new genes into yeast but with a bit of work I would think that you can also do good meat replacements with it.
Maybe algee instead of yeast, but I don't see the point in using multicellular organisms if you want to grow something to eat in a lab.
The real problem is that people are unwilling to give up meat. That's why growing it in labs is important. It would cut down on animal suffering, pollution and makes farmland available for other things.
For what definition of "meat"?
Good question. I guess at least the taste and texture needs to be the same as dead mammal. That's what I like about meat.
Maybe I've just had bad vegetarian cooking, but I've never had the texture replicated properly.
I think the engineering problem of getting a bunch of yeast with a bit of genetic engineering to show the same texture as meet is easier than the engineering problem of growing cost effective animal muscle in the lab.
Not 'cheaper' and I pretty much fail to see how that can ever happen.
Also, most people don't think technology will deliver eutopia. Why should it?
I guess in the long term it should be cheaper for the same reason that vegetables are more energy efficient than meat: it takes less energy to grow just a muscle than to also grow a surrounding cow that runs around frolicking for several years.
And to provide for what a functioning immune system and digestive system and endocrine system provides in a living animal, in one convenient package that grows right alongside the meat, but instead with external infrastructure? It's crazy what mycobacteria can do to mammalian tissue culture overnight if the wrong dust particle floats in or how many inputs it takes to get non-tumor mammalian somatic cells to divide in a reasonable period in a dish rather than their usual environment. There's reasons that the only industrial biotech processes that use animal cells are things that make antibodies and the like that nothing else can make and are very expensive, and instead everybody else uses fungi or bacteria.
I realize there are lots of practical problems. But "can ever happen" is a long time.
True. But time and engineering doesn't make everything possible, and if something is possible it doesn't always make it likely. The world does have limits both practical and theoretical, contrary to what the popular mythology of progress implicitly suggests.
Beyond Meat seems to be more healthy, tastes the same and promises to be cheaper (18x) than meat. Any they successfully did this to egg products already. I mean I don't think that it will look like a genuine body piece - most people don't already buy that anyway.