> Little is focused on ideas about what to aim for instead.

Adam here from RethinkX. Agreed, there is far too much catastrophism and general doom-and-gloom, especially around climate change. What’s been sorely missing is a clear explanation for how new technology offers concrete solutions and a real path forward to a brighter future. This is a large part of what my team at RethinkX focuses on. It’s also (sorry for the shameless plug) the focus of my new book, Brighter: Optimism, Progress, and the Future of Environmentalism.

Adam from RethinkX here. When the other technology subs started getting overrun by doomscrollers and stopped being about a brighter future a few years back, I switched to this sub for futurism and disruption related news and it’s been great - much better curation of current news and much more thoughtful and well-informed discussions.

I usually only lurk, but if you want to message the mods and have them DM me, I’d be happy to do an AMA sometime.

Thanks for your interest in our work!

It's hard to separate the signal from the noise during the pandemic period, but in broad terms the cost improvements are right on track with what we expected - mainly because of the absolutely massive scaling that is currently going on globally in this new industry. We are hoping to publish an update to our earlier analysis next year, but my personal expectation is that the original projections in the 2019 report will prove to be quite accurate as we approach 2030.

As for when the new products approach parity, it depends on the exact product in particular geographic regions/markets, but my general expectation is that by the mid-2020s there will be many markets where precision fermentation and cellular agriculture products are being produced the same or lower cost than traditional animal products. Keep in mind that cost (for producers) is not the same as the price that end-consumers pay.

It's a great point, and a concern I share. The thing that makes me so optimistic is that prosperity and abundance really change the game. We've seen this historically again and again. When something is scarce or expensive, that's when people argue, debate, fight, go to war. When it's sufficiently cheap and abundant and free of terrible side-effects, then people stop fighting over it.

So, when clean energy and clean food and automation converge to render themselves and virtually everything else superabundant, that opens up a huge new opportunity to stop fighting and start cooperating.

Prosperity really is a fundamental enabling condition of cooperation - and it's of course self-reinforcing. There is a crucial corollary here too, which is that if we voluntarily dive into scarcity by downsizing and degrowing economically in the name of sustainability, we will shoot ourselves in the foot, because scarcity (aka poverty, let's not kid ourselves) will foment conflict of every kind. Concerns about the environment and sustainability are some of the first things to go out the window amidst poverty and social conflict.

Howdy, Adam Dorr, Director of Research at RethinkX here. My team did some key work in 2019 that laid out the disruptive potential of these new food technologies. We coined the term precision fermentation in that original report, which is become the industry term of art.

We also analyzed the climate change implications of these new food technologies in combination with the energy and transportation disruptions.

If anyone is interested in these new technologies, I just published a new book that discusses the potential of precision fermentation, cellular agriculture, and the other disruptive clean technologies to help us solve our greatest environmental problems. The book is titled Brighter: Optimism, Progress, and the Future of Environmentalism, and it was inspired in no small part by the enormous amount of pessimism and doom-and-gloom I've seen here on Reddit and elsewhere online, especially among young people. It's absolutely heartbreaking that people think our future is bleak, when in fact there has never been greater cause for data-driven optimism. I wanted to show everyone how our work at RethinkX points to a future that is far, FAR brighter than many imagine.

If you need cheering up for the holidays, check it out: shameless plug.

I'll be around for a bit this morning and will keep an eye on this post, if anyone has any questions!