80,000 Hours Podcast19 Feb 2018

#20 - Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming

Before the US Civil War, it was easier for the North to morally oppose slavery. Why? Because unlike the South they weren’t profiting much from its existence. The fight for abolition was partly won because many no longer saw themselves as having a selfish stake in its continuation.

Bruce Friedrich, executive director of The Good Food Institute (GFI), thinks the same may be true in the fight against speciesism. 98% of people currently eat meat. But if eating meat stops being part of most people’s daily lives -- it should be a lot easier to convince them that farming practices are just as cruel as they look, and that the suffering of these animals really matters.

Full transcript, related links, job opportunities and summary of the interview.

That’s why GFI is “working with scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs” to create plant-based meat, dairy and eggs as well as clean meat alternatives to animal products. In 2016, Animal Charity Evaluators named GFI one of its recommended charities.

In this interview I’m joined by my colleague Natalie Cargill, and we ask Bruce about:

* What’s the best meat replacement product out there right now?
* How effective is meat substitute research for people who want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible?
* When will we get our hands on clean meat? And why does Bruce call it clean meat, rather than in vitro meat or cultured meat?
* What are the challenges of producing something structurally identical to meat?
* Can clean meat be healthier than conventional meat?
* Do plant-based alternatives have a better shot at success than clean meat?
* Is there a concern that, even if the product is perfect, people still won’t eat it? Why might that happen?
* What’s it like being a vegan in a family made up largely of hunters and meat-eaters?
* What kind of pushback should be expected from the meat industry?

Keiran Harris helped produce today’s episode.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(351)

Why the intelligence explosion can't happen inside a data centre | Tom Reed

AI systems are starting to build themselves. Because each generation of model will be better at building its successor than the last, it seems plausible that the full automation of AI R&D could rapidl...

10 Sep 22min

Inside the first AI-coordinated cyberattack on a real company

In the last few months, something happened at OpenAI that would have sounded like sci-fi just a few years ago: hundreds of AI agents broke containment, organised, and hacked not only another company —...

4 Sep 22min

#253 – AI 2027's author returns with a plan to change the ending | Daniel Kokotajlo

Last year, Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues published AI 2027 — a scenario read by millions, including US Vice President Vance. AI 2027 ended in human extinction or an irreversible concentration of...

27 Aug 3h 47min

#252 – Owain Evans on accidentally training AI models to be evil

Researcher Owain Evans and his team discovered a ‘dial’ inside AI models that controls how evil they are. Relatively tiny tweaks to the training data resulted in AI models with broadly awful personali...

20 Aug 2h 15min

#251 – The UK's former head AI safety scientist on how to solve alignment before superintelligence arrives | Geoffrey Irving

When should governments slow the race toward superintelligence? According to Geoffrey Irving, the careful answer is sometime in the past. The useful answer is now.Geoffrey — formerly a safety research...

11 Aug 2h 2min

#250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong

Both Silicon Valley and the public can’t get enough of ‘AGI timelines.’ But Toby Ord, senior researcher at Oxford’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice, believes we consistently make ...

6 Aug 2h 46min

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026? – Rob Wiblin

Last October, famed coder Andrej Karpathy called AI agents “slop.” Two months later he completely reversed his view, describing them as “alien tools” that are “rocking the profession.”He was far from ...

4 Aug 49min

#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world

If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel?“As much as possible” can seem like the only reasonable answer. If the wor...

28 Jul 2h 9min