Meat And Money

The Ray Kurzweil free newsletter to which I’ve subscribed for many years has two items this week of strong interest to science fiction fans. One deals with an early success in growing meat in a lab – no living animals required. The second addresses the likely future of retailing. Both illustrate that the pace of change in industrialized societies continues unabated, and that one of Kurzweil’s major predictions, that the pace itself is speeding up, is coming true.

Factory grown meat is an old SF future projection standby. I’ve used it myself. Natural selection made us homo saps omnivores (check your teeth), and meat is a part of our nature-developed diet. But we humans are no longer as tightly bound to nature and heredity’s dictates as are almost all other animals; we have far more free choice. A large and steadily growing number of us have chosen to stop eating animal flesh. But that can be a very unhealthy choice, since certain vital nutrients are normally available only in animal tissue. (And our inherited taste buds just plain like! many varieties of meat.) Lab-grown meat, which could presumably be textured, flavored, supplemented by the addition of specific needed amino acids, etc.), can be an attractive alternative. And, moral questions aside, factory-grown meat would eliminate the extremely inefficient present system of raising untold millions of animals each year for slaughter. Most of the immense amounts of grain and other animal fodder saved could be fed directly to people. 

This would, of course, put thousands if not millions of people now engaged in raising, slaughtering, and butchering animals out of business. But some can be trained for jobs in the new meat factories, and the others, hopefully, will find better and less bloody jobs. 

Economic experts call the USA a consumer-driven society. If we all stopped buying anything other than what we need to survive – food, shelter, transportation, health care – the economy would collapse. Probably half or more of us wouldn’t have jobs. Most of us want more than the basic necessities, and the economy supplies us with the money to purchase lots of nice ‘extras’. All that spending adds up to what is commonly called a ‘standard of living’ – in our case a good one, but no longer among the world’s tops We get all those goodies through a system of production and distribution called retail trade. Ray Kurzweil predicts some major changes coming up, where we will be buying many of the gadgets –er, life-enhancing added values -- he talks about here. (For those of you not familiar with Kurzweil’s work, he’s said most of this before, in other forums. Ray is now working as a VP at Google, incidentally, in their creative future thinking department. He should be right at home there.)’ 

Here’s the full original article.