Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Today, I'm chatting with Lewis Bollard, who is Farm Animal Welfare Program Director at Open Philanthropy, and Open Philanthropy is the biggest charity in this animal welfare space. So Lewis, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Lewis Bollard** (0:10)
Thanks for having me on.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:11)
Okay, first question. At some point, we'll have AGI. How do you just think about the problem you're trying to solve? Are you trying to make conditions more tolerable for the next 10 years until AI solves this problem for us, or is there some reason to think that the interventions we're making in terms of improvements like in over-sexing or cage-free eggs, etc., will have an impact beyond this transformative moment?

**Lewis Bollard** (0:36)
I think that the end of factory farming is far from inevitable. Every year, we're factory farming about 2% more animals globally. I think there are two possible trajectories we could go down. One is the trajectory that we have been on for the last century, which is technology has made factory farming ever more efficient, resulted in ever more animals being abused in ever more intensive ways. There is a trajectory where we reduce the number of animals on factory farms, where we reduce the suffering of each of those animals. So even if we get AGI, I am really optimistic that that will accelerate forms of technological progress. It will bring us better alternative proteins. It will improve the humane technology. But there are still huge cultural and political obstacles to alternatives. So the cultural obstacles are that most people want real meat. I mean, most people have the option already of plant-based meat that tastes about as good as real meat.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:30)
That's it. I don't know.

**Lewis Bollard** (1:31)
Well, so this is the debate.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:32)
That's fair.

**Lewis Bollard** (1:32)
This is the debate. But I don't think that's just the obstacle that people have. I think there are a lot of people who say, I'm just not interested in the alternative. I want the real thing. And then there's also the political obstacle. So let's say that AGI solves cultivated meat for us. Well, cultivated meat is already illegal in seven US states. It might soon be illegal in the entire European Union. So by the time we get AGI, will they even be able to sell it anywhere? So again, I think there's a huge amount of good that technology can do in this space. And I'm optimistic that AGI can accelerate that hugely. But at the same time, I think we should prepare for the significant possibility that AGI does not end factory farming. That actually this is an incredibly efficient system that has persisted through all kinds of technological changes and that could persist through this technological change.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:16)
What is it that makes it so efficient?

**Lewis Bollard** (2:18)
So, the basic efficiency is that the animal and the chicken in particular has evolved over a very long time to be a being that can take in a relatively small amount of grain and convert it very efficiently into a form of protein that people like to eat. So the feed conversion ratio for chickens, the amount of grain you put in to get meat out is like 2x. And that grain is incredibly cheap.
And the rest of the production process is incredibly cheap because they've removed everything that costs money around like treating the animals well and providing comfort and all that stuff. They've just gotten rid of it all. So they've gotten down to the point where it's insanely cheap. So you're trying to beat the price of grain times 2 plus a few extra costs. And that is actually a really hard target to meet. And that's why factory-farmed chicken is so insanely cheap today.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:08)
Maybe an intuition pump here is we've been spending on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in order to replicate human intelligence. And human intelligence has been developed, I don't know, it depends on when you start counting, intelligence has started evolving. But on the order of hundreds to tens of millions of years ago, evolution has been trying to optimize for this intelligence thing. And we've had to spend all this effort in order to replicate it. Converting calories into meat has been something that evolution has been optimizing for billions of years, right? So everything from the immune system to growth factors to delivering nutrition, etc., or a texture, or whatever. This is like, this is what evolution is working on the entire time. So it makes sense why this is actually such a tough problem. Are you ready to throw some cold water on your friends?