Imagining the Chicken Farm of the Future, Part 1: On-Farm Everything

Some believe that artificial intelligence will dramatically increase economic growth in the near future. Once AI becomes advanced enough to perform most or all tasks currently done by humans, including running companies and scientific research, some experts believe we could have annual GDP growth reaching 30%. If this is even close to true, things will get very weird very quickly. This level of growth would mean we double societal wealth every three years, and each generation will be 1,000 times richer than their parents. The only possible analogy we have at our disposal is the transition from pre-industrial to post-industrial society, where we saw growth rates reach 13%, but only briefly and in specific regions.

No matter how much this growth changes society, humans will (probably?) stay the same. We’ll still want to raise animals for food. But we’ll also be able to afford vastly more accommodations for things like animal welfare.

One of the challenges of this newsletters’ project of applying a techno-optimist lens to animal agriculture is that it can be hard to envision the type of future we’re building towards. For sustainability, we can imagine a world where solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear power plants provide limitless clean energy, and the electrification of every sector allows us to turn this energy into limitless productivity. That world isn’t unimaginably different from our own. What is the equivalent vision for animal farming?

The short answer is that I don’t exactly know. But I think we can and should take a stab at starting to envision it.

This is the first part of a multi-part series that tries to imagine how animal husbandry might work in a world where there are vastly more resources to throw at every problem. The ideas I discuss in this series are not meant to be prescriptive, just a first stab. Ideally, volumes of research would be devoted to this question, as has been done to map out the clean energy transition.

The practical implications of this exercise are necessarily limited. In a world of truly transformational AI, there’s no way to know what kind of scientific advancements will be made, meaning that whatever I say here will necessarily be too conservative and unambitious. And in the short term economics will continue to be a limiting factor on achieving this strange and exciting future.

However, I hope this exercise can help justify ...