Dear friend,
Frankly, I had not expected such a consistent and deep response. I enjoyed it, thank you.
So, we have two topics: information scarcity and true material scarcity.
An issue I have with “artificial substitutes” relates to the substitutes, i.e., non-original and possibly different (a bit) things. Counting on your involvement in scientific endeavours (even if it is from the economic/financial side), let me explain my concern using programming. In there, developers (at least of the old school) have a method of cloning when a fragment of code is copied from one place in the program to another. The fragments are identical, though located in different places and even different contexts and environments. If the developer had not put any annotations/comments on each fragment, it would be impossible to say which fragment was original. To me, it is not a substitution.
So, your explanations about “producing biologically identical ones through new, more sustainable methods” are not a substitution. The issue I mentioned earlier is the ethics. I believe in people’s wisdom – if something can be done, it will be done. If we can build a nuclear power plant and engines, we will build a nuclear bomb, and no paper/written policies will stop the latter. As a former scientist/researcher and then technology architect, I used to define risks first, before the thing was built. I’ve got your point regarding “decoupling food production from a resource-intensive process”; it will be a great achievement. You say that biological cloning “is a different, more efficient path to the same natural endpoint before cloning”, but why should it substitute an original form of agricultural production? Why does Bill Gates buy up American livestock farms and destroy them?
Biology and the food industry do not give sensible, reasonable answers to this.
However, the political (surprise, surprise) aspect of such activities (and related scientific research) lights out the general purpose. YOU might think that the purpose is to feed the poor populations of Africa, Asia and the Americas. Unfortunately, it is not. As you might know, many domesticated dogs cannot find food for themselves when their owners throw them away and die. In the context of material scarcity, those dogs (and similar people) lose the ability to feed themselves; in the informational scarcity – people who are given all information, including to-be-done decisions, stop thinking and become moncurts (humans with a suppressed mind and incapable of acting without commands). I’ve written about this in the article https://howto-architect.com/2025/05/30/creativity-paradox-of-generative-ai/.
In other words, artificially produced identical food may be well eaten… if given. The owners of the artificial food plants, like Bill Gates, obtain absolute control over the food supplies and can manage people via controlled access to this food. This is not news – Russian communists used this method to rule socialistic Russia for 70 years: “Who does not work for the Soviet government does not eat.” The only thing that is needed to be created is a food scarcity! I’ve worked for one charity organisation supplying Asia and Africa and learnt that sometimes, the food deficit was ‘organised” to send caravans and get access to their funding. You know what I mean.
As you can see now, I do not share your hopes that “when the struggle for survival subsides, we are freed to be driven by something higher: the pursuit of purpose, the joy of creation, and boundless curiosity.” My learnt pragmatism has killed my hopes: this freedom comes with the cost of stupid obedience and intelligent slavery, loss of curiosity and need for creations of anything that is not preliminarily approved by the food givers. You are welcome to read my recent book “Married to Deepfake” https://howto-architect.com/e-books/ and other materials at https://howto-architect.com/blogs-and-articles/ .
Since you are in the business of biological cloning, may I kindly ask you to figure out how to put a leash on human cloning?
HOW to ARCHITECT for DEVELOPERS 