If We Don’t End Factory Farming Soon, It Might Be Here Forever.

Do you know what the most popular book is? No, it’s not Harry Potter. But it does talk about spells. It’s the Bible, and it has been for centuries. In the past 50 years alone, the Bible has sold over 3.9 billion copies. And the second best-selling book? The Quran, at 800 million copies.

As Oxford Professor William MacAskill, author of the new book “What We Owe The Future”—a tome on effective altruism and “longtermism”—explains, excerpts from these millennia-old schools of thought influence politics around the world: “The Babylonian Talmud, for example, compiled over a millennium ago, states that ‘the embryo is considered to be mere water until the fortieth day’—and today Jews tend to have much more liberal attitudes towards stem cell research than Catholics, who object to this use of embryos because they believe life begins at conception. Similarly, centuries-old dietary restrictions are still widely followed, as evidenced by India’s unusually high rate of vegetarianism, a $20 billion kosher food market, and many Muslims’ abstinence from alcohol.”

The reason for this is simple: once rooted, value systems tend to persist for an extremely long time. And when it comes to factory farming, there’s reason to believe we may be at an inflection point.

For context, CAFOs—or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, large-scale industrial agricultural facilities that confine animals under torturous conditions to produce cheap meat, eggs, or milk—are a relatively recent invention. In 1923, egg producer Cecile Steele of Delaware’s Delmarva Peninsula mistakenly received 10 times as many chicks as she had ordered: 500 rather than 50. In an exercise of resourcefulness, Steele decided to raise them for meat. By selling the meat at such a scale, she was able to turn an impressive profit, much more than she would have made from eggs alone. Within a decade, word spread of the profitability of raising broiler chickens, and at least 500 such operations popped up. Today, 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms. Globally, it’s about 90%, and trending upwards. Meat consumption is now at its highest in recorded history.

If we don’t reverse course soon, industrial animal agriculture—and the value system that deems it both acceptable and necessary to raise animals under such conditions and eat their meat—could be here to stay.

As it turns out, history tells us that it’s much easier to influence values when they are still new than later on, when things have settled. As an example of this dynamic he calls “early plasticity, later rigidity,” MacAskill asks us to consider the U.S. Constitution. It was written over 116 days, and amended eleven times in the first six years. But in the last fifty years, it’s only been amended once. I suspect that if we don’t make headway in ending factory farming soon, it’ll be not unlike many of the constitutional laws we find distasteful—seemingly impossible to overturn.

And as environmentalist Bill McKibben tells MacAskill, the climate movement knows this all too well: “Thirty years ago, there were relatively small things we could have done that would have changed the trajectory of this battle—a small price on carbon back then would have yielded a different trajectory, would have put us in a different place. We might not have solved climate change yet because it’s a huge problem, but we’d be on the way.”

Major technological advances, too, play a role in locking in values. Writing, for example, invented around five thousand years ago, was crucial, MacAskill points out, “enabling complex ideas to be transmitted many generations into the future without inevitable distortion by the failures of human memory.” Indeed, moral worldviews like Christianity and Islam would not have achieved widespread popularity without writing as a technology. And the key technology of our generation isn’t electric cars or TikTok, but rather artificial intelligence; it could impact the future, and our perception of the moral acceptability and the sheer existence of factory farms, for millions of years to come.

To understand why, we first need to unpack exactly what artificial intelligence (AI) means. Put simply, it’s the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. Your smartphone uses AI, as do your social media and streaming services. And thanks to machine learning—a subfield of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn without explicitly being programmed—AI can solve complex problems in a way that is similar to how humans do. Remember in 2011 when IBM Watson, the room-sized supercomputer, beat jeopardy legends Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter? That was machine learning in action, and it’s gotten even more advanced since. Today, AI can create award-winning images and art, drive and park your car, and even be a Twitter troll. But the holy grail of artificial intelligence is something called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the ability of an “ultraintelligent” agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. Think WALL-E and R2-D2, agents, or collections of agents, capable of making their own plans and executing them. We aren’t there yet, but experts predict there’s a non-negligible chance we could be in the decades to come.

And here’s the crux: If it arrives, it may lock-in the values that exist at the time, including how we think about and treat animals on factory farms. This is because an AGI could be coded to reflect the preferences of the programmer—a potentially powerful individual or institution, since it’s unlikely this technology will emerge in a decentralized way given the capital and technical expertise required to build it—for the purpose of assisting them in achieving their and what they believe should be society’s goals, and one of those goals might be raising animals for food. What’s more, an AGI would be able to figure out how to farm animals in even more efficient ways, decreasing the cost of meat—which most people would celebrate—and increasing the profit margins of those who stand to benefit from this technology. No human would be more powerful than an AGI, so whatever force aims an AGI would have more power than any force that does not have that ability.

This value lock-in, combined with the fact that an AGI would not be hard to replicate, makes it such that the values encoded into the AGI could exist for as long as the universe can support life. As MacAskill writes, “There’s nothing different in principle between the software that encodes Pong and the software that encodes an AGI. Since that software can be copied with high fidelity, an AGI can survive changes in the hardware instantiating it. AGI agents are potentially immortal.”

And this matters a lot, not just because of factory farms on Earth, but because of factory farms that could come to exist elsewhere. Humans may begin populating other planets, perhaps starting with Mars (especially if billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have their way). They may attempt to make other planets more Earth-like in their conditions—a process called “terraforming”—or even create structures in space where there were no planets before, so that they can support human, animal, and plant life. And they may want to eat animals, just like they do on Earth. (We are creatures of habit, after all.) Indeed, scientists are already working on meeting this future demand as part of numerous programs to deploy everything from chicken to fish to insect farming in space. Undoubtedly, colonizing other planets multiplies the potential for animal suffering.

To be sure, technologies could also render factory farming unnecessary without a moral revolution, before any lock-in factors arrive. But there’s no guarantee of that. For starters, plant-based meat alternatives like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods still occupy a precarious place in our economy, in part because the taste and texture isn’t up to par with the preferences of omnivores. And it’s too soon to tell if cell-cultured meat will be broadly and commercially viable due to its high price. (In theory, an AGI could help with improving alternative proteins, but it could easily be factory farming that wins out.) And even if we invent the relevant technologies necessary to achieve parity, some meaningful portion of the population might still value meat from slaughtered animals for cultural reasons, such as they are grossed out by artificial meats. (Plus, we might farm animals for all sorts of other reasons, including futuristic ones, like for making organs or semiconductors.)

What all this means is that we are at a pivotal moment with respect to factory farming and our relationship to animals. In one version of the future, we will look back in horror at how we raised animals for food and are grateful for our generation who turned the tide. But in another, we will be eating and exploiting animals just like we do today. And potentially for millions of years to come.

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