It May Be Impossible to Outcompete Factory Farming – Lewis Bollard

Today, I'm chatting with Louis Bollard, who is farm animal welfare program director at Open Philanthropy. And Open Philanthropy is the biggest charity in this animal welfare space. So Louis, thanks so much for coming on

the podcast. Thanks for having

me on. 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 ten 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 Innova sexing or cage free eggs, etcetera, will have an impact beyond this transformative moment?

I think that the end of factory farming is far from inevitable. Every year, we're factory farming about 2% more animals

Mhmm.

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. Yeah. 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 I am really optimistic that that will accelerate forms of technological progress. It will bring us better alternative proteins. It will improve the humane techn

What is it that makes it so efficient?

So the the basic efficiency is the the animal and the chicken in particular Yeah. 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 two two x. And that grain is incredibly cheap. Right. And the rest of the production process is incredibly cheap because they've they've removed everything that costs money around, like, treating the animals well and providing comfort and a

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 when you start counting intelligence has started evolving, but like 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