 All right. Welcome everyone. It's really good to see all of you here today. My name is Hannah, Hannah van Den Bosch, and I am from Studium Generale. We organize all kinds of activities, also like this one, on topics that matter. You can see some on the screens on there. We will also have more events coming up for November, so be sure to check our website as well. And it's also good to know that we have a certificate that you can get as a student from Tilburg University, for which you have to visit five of our events, write a small report about it, and give your own personal reflection about it, and then you can get the certificate actually. If you're interested, please check out our website as well. But I'm not alone today in organizing this event. I'm really pleased to invite Julia on the floor from AI Forward Forum. Judith, who is sitting there, is also from AI Forward Forum, and they will tell a little bit more about who they are and what they do. So please. Good afternoon. It's really nice to see you all here in the flesh, so about the AI Forward Forum. So these days we hear so much about artificial intelligence, but we don't often hear about those who are behind creating it. And here's a question to you. So actually, who do you think are the fields or areas that are important for creating a general purpose AI system? So those systems that are supposed to be reaching human level intelligence. And really, this is the question for audience participation, so if you can just raise your hand and shout out, what do you think? Who are the people? Who are what sort of areas are important? Anyone? Yeah. Yeah, so we hear psychology, cognitive science, any more answers other than these? Okay, but I think that's a good start. So indeed, psychology, cognitive science, art, we think, law. So many, actually, we think many areas. And how this idea came about. So a little more than a year ago, we started this initiative AI Forward Forum with this thinking or idea in mind that developing AI systems should go beyond just the involvement of computer scientists, ML engineers, or neuroscientists that actually it requires concerted efforts from a range of domains, so cutting across the science, the humanities, and arts. So everyone's involvement is vital. And we also think that there are social tile implications to this because would you rather have AI systems developed by a small group of people or be it a socially driven process? So all these ideas were simmering in our heads. And then we started AI Forward Forum as a platform for different people to come together to exchange ideas related to artificial intelligence and ideally to come up with a set of new ideas, a roadmap that could be useful when developing general purpose AI systems. So what we do in practical terms, we organize an online talk series that takes place every month. And to which we have been inviting a bunch of prominent speakers all across a range of domains, so psychology, cognitive science, computer scientists, science, design, philosophy, you name it. And also the geography of speakers is very wide. So the United States, but also European countries as we then the Netherlands, of course, the UK, France and so on. And here also on the slide, you can get a taste of what's coming up still this autumn. So a talk on game AI and quantum computing. And if you would like to know more about this initiative, you can go to AIForwardForum.com to check out the recordings of previous talks and some associated resources. You can just subscribe to our newsletter and hopefully join this growing community. So that much about AI Forward Forum. All right, then I will take over again. Really check them out. I think they do really interesting talks online. So yeah, definitely visit one. All right, so today, of course, you saw the title, the Technological Future of Food and Farming, quite a title, I think. But what do we want to actually discuss today? Well, of course, you have big debates going on today about food scarcity, climate change, but also the recent Dutch farmers protests. Actually, they really make you think about what the future of our food production will look like. And then really the question that is raised a lot, I think, is saying, can technological innovation solve everything, or are there other steps to take as well? That's a debate you hear a lot. Thinking further about these questions, we have invited three speakers today who will tell something about this. First, we will start with Oen Visser, and then we will have a case study talk by Amanda Kostem. There will be then, after the second lecture, we will have a 10-minute break. And then we will end with the third case study talk by Julia Kepler, and then end with a 15-minute interactive Q&A, where we also really want you to participate, ask any questions that you may have. And this interactive Q&A will be moderated by Julia and Yudita, who you just saw. Okay, then I think it's time to introduce the first speaker. Am I pronouncing it right? Oen Visser. He's an associate professor from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And his research interests lie in new digital technologies, large-scale farming, and also the financialization of agriculture. And for today, he will actually tell us more about the current developments in agriculture technology, and also connected to bigger issues that we're seeing right now in our society. So please give a big applause for Oen. Thank you for the invitation to speak here. It's a nice setting here in the theater. When I was a PhD student, I was doing improvisation theater. So it's nice to be back on more like a theater stage rather than a lecture room. So yeah, here's mine. So I will talk especially about the processes of digitalization technology in the form of new digital technologies which are increasingly entering the space of agriculture and food. Technology is something seen as a solution to a lot of problems which are a kind of hunting agriculture in the Netherlands and lots of other countries. Yesterday, a new report was, as many of you will know, a report was presented about the nitrogen crisis. And we had a very heated summer, both in terms of temperature and in terms of farmer protest. So yeah, there is a lot of debate about the challenges which are which agriculture is currently facing. And a big part of that debate is whether new technologies can be a solution to address the problems and especially the environmental problems of agriculture. So the current food system, both here in the Netherlands and Europe globally also faces a lot of problems, mounting problems, which come more and more aware, not only to scientists, but also increasingly aware to farmers themselves, to the broader audience. So we have a whole range. And when we think about environmental challenges, we have water and soil pollution. We have soil degradation. Part of my research was in Russia and Ukraine, there you have the very fertile black soils, but even they are not as fertile already anymore as they once were. They seem like infinitely fertile. And the same is for the most fertile ground in, for example, Flavorland, which is diminishing. So then we have the large footprint of global food transport. Yeah, we are importing strawberries in winter from from Morocco and Kenya and flowers. Recent studies just last year showed that we have been underestimating even that footprint that is bigger than we thought. Then there is a decreasing effectiveness of chemicals. Yeah, we see especially in the U.S. where there has been much more even use of chemicals than in the EU, that there is growing wheat resistance of all kinds of wheat resistance against those chemicals is increasing. Do we see the rise of animal diseases just this week? It was announced that all the chickens, the poultry has to be locked up because the new bird flu risk. And it's just we have, it's just calmed down and the new diseases are already coming. Yeah, and we have had a discussion out of Corona and animal diseases and that interlinkage. So there are risks also to not only to animals and the environment, but also to human health. Then there are the pathogens like the oil sector in in Southern Italy, one of my PhDs is doing research there. And hectares and hectares and kilometers of oil, the oil production of the in the South, where trees are destroyed by pathogens. And monoculture is one of the reasons for that. So we see of course the debate about agriculture as a large contributor to climate change. It's estimated that roughly some quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions are originating from agriculture, and especially from the livestock sector. And then of course, the nitrogen crisis. So those are the environmental challenges. But then we have also the economic challenges. So we have had after the world war, the building up of the European and US food system, where food was increasingly cheaper. And we have seen that we as a good sentences over the past decades, as a percentage had to to spend less and less money on food comparatively to other costs, which is a luxury. It is very much the question whether that is sustainable for the coming years. And we see that. Yeah, the all kinds of efficiencies have been introduced, and the profits have been squeezed out and the margins for most of the farmers have decreased. So we see lots of farmers complaining about we have to introduce even more regulations, but from which money should we do that because we many already are below the minimum wage. At the same time, there are also some farmer millionaires, this problem of inequality. But economically, at least for the past 10, 15 years, there has been growing concern also in this area. Is it is this model of conventional agriculture? Is it economically even viable? And then it's socially, there was also we as citizens, we had the security of oversupply even of especially in Europe, oversupply of food and cheap food. And then like in 2006, 2007, there was this major hike in food prices. Maybe you remember that. And then there were all kinds of food protests in Madagascar, a government fell because of that. There were big, there was this tendency of land grabs as well discussed. So food certainly wasn't so so low priced anymore and not so and stable prices started to finish. Then we entered re entered a relatively short period of more stability. And now with the Ukraine crisis, we see increasingly again, yeah, that food prices not only in the global South, not only in developing countries, but also in the West are starting to rise. And it seems that those crises in food, this food crisis become a kind of the new normal, that it's hard to talk anymore about events, incidents, it is becoming more of a pattern, this huge volatility. And that's all also related to our system of how we do food like conventional large scale with very much export driven. When we had the previous food crisis like 2006, 2007, yeah, and the kind of on the global level, the response was to cope with this volatility, this rising food prices, the instability in the food system, the way to cope was that basically in the global North, yeah, here, we kind of postponed measures forward, did some like window dressing kind of actions. And there was a big move to, yeah, says, okay, the margins are going down environmental problems. We just moved to the global South where there is supposedly lots of abandoned or unused land, yeah, and labor is cheap, land is cheap. So there was this idea, we will feed the world by moving there. So we had this, this big trend of transnational land investment or land grabbing, which I studied to many colleagues over the world. And basically it was the same model just spreading out, yeah, basically also exporting the problems to other areas. And that was often unsuccessful. So there were a lot of biofuels which appeared not to be a viable model. There was a mismatch often crops and agro ecological conditions, rural systems, corruption, so lots of reasons why a lot of products, projects failed. So now we are hitting another food crisis, yeah? So the move to the global South appeared not to be a super good solution. So now the new kind of magic bullet is technological innovation, yeah, both in meat, et cetera, but I will focus on the, yeah, the digitalization of agriculture as the new hope. So there's a lot of talk about an emerging or already ongoing digital revolution in agriculture, especially in the global north here in Europe, the US, but there is also very much the idea that the green revolution, yeah, which was taking place in the global South in the 50s and the 60s in production of pesticides and fertilizer, basically, and some tractors sometimes that didn't take off really in Africa. And now the idea is that this huge potential of Africa and some parts of the global South could certainly brought very actively in production with a new green revolution, but then this time a digital green revolution, yeah. So this is all built on the, the progress, technological progress which has been happening in the past 10, 15 years in terms of internet, not just something being, which something we encounter in our computer, but which can enters and penetrates our life through all kinds of sensors, yeah? So that has also been happening in agriculture. You have sensors mounted to milk robots onto cows in the soil on combines and big progress in terms of precision with satellites, the rise of smartphones. These are key developments with which now potentially at least enable this kind of new digital agrarian revolution. And I'll just show you a few pictures to give you a sense of new developments across, yeah, the food chain, and then I will zoom in more in the farm, yeah, on the farmer's side. So in farming, we see the appearance of robots, also harvesting robots, here, a pepper robot developed by research from Wageningen. Lots of this horticultural robots, they are still in a trial state, but some are already a bit in the commercial state. And then there are increasingly drones I use to monitor diseases in crops here across the field, sometimes to spray pesticides. Then on the level of food trade, global food trade, you see that food traders like Cargill, those big transnational food traders, they increasingly try to have a global overview and almost real-time overview of all the food streams across the world, yeah? And that is being enabled by new technologies, blockchain is increasingly introduced. Then in retail, we see this is still rare, but this is in California, US pizza bot with pre-pair of pizza. This is already more common, yeah? Automated checkout in supermarkets, and this is also already starting to come quite common, yeah? The platform economy food delivery. Then zooming in a bit more into farming, yeah, the farm level, this new digitalization of agriculture goes by different names, it's something called smart farming, precision farming, digital farming, the different definitions. And I think it will be interesting to show you a bit of the view of the proponents of digital agriculture, yeah? How it's seen by some of the tech providers, yeah? And then I will go into some of the, yeah, the other side, more critical side limitations. That is fine, yeah? So there will be two very short little movies. These are basically ads by KPN, yeah? The telecom company, that was the first one. And then another one also by the telecom company, very brief one. Unfortunately, it's for foreigners, it's just in that field, can I say that? Maybe someone who has an impression, a response about what kind of picture of digital agriculture you get? Or what kind of emotions or feelings that it evokes? To me, any? Yeah, yeah, it's like you can just stay in bed. Normally, as a farmer, you have to go up at six o'clock and it's cold and a short night and now you just, like, in bed with your tablet and a lot of work is done for you, yeah? So this idea of convenience and also, yeah, the second movie, what kind of message does it send about agriculture, digital agriculture, the use of smartphones in response? I think it's very much to me, it gives this idea of precision, yeah? So the farmer, it's all intuition based and it's also an old farmer, like this idea, it's outdated knowledge, yeah? And then you have the digital world at your fingertips and certainly you get the super precise answers, yeah? And you basically, the farmer knowledge is also a bit kind of discredited here in my perspective, yeah? And so that brings me to two questions about this new technology, so we see some of the proposed benefits here, but will it likely be to the benefit of the farmer, yeah? Is it really like that? Like, more productive, we have the problem with a lot of young people not wanting to go into agriculture, are you now suddenly thinking like, okay, I leave my office and I'm going to the field to become a farmer and is it good for sustainability, yeah? I will focus mostly at the first, a few things about the last, because the other speakers I think will talk more about the last point about sustainability, so I'll focus more on the social economic side, political side of it. So the question is there, yeah, about precision, imprecision of this new technologies, empowerment, or is it this empowerment? It's the first topic I will discuss and then I'll go into the aspect of the data, yeah, data surveillance and the risk of that and data capture. So I will focus a little bit on one aspect of agriculture technology, because there are so many here, and that's in arable farming, where there is this currently increasingly popular idea of technology of yield mapping. What is that? So the idea is that data becomes very central to the work of the farmer, say a farmer who has potatoes or weeds, say, and the idea is that before you start planning, yeah, and you base your work not on your experience from the last year, but on prescription maps generated by software, yeah, would give all kinds of very precise advice of how much you should apply, how much fertilizer, how much seed in a particular spot in your field, yeah, so supposedly very precise, and then you do different actions across the season, yeah, along the circle like seeding, and then as a farmer what you do, you do some action, but every time ideally at the same time you gather data, yeah, so you're both doing your agriculture work and sending data into the cloud, yeah, and so your soil sensing, while you're seeding, you're fertilizing, and then getting collecting also data, and then on top, I will focus most on that, once you are harvesting the weed, for example, with a combine, that combine registers how much per square meter you harvest, yeah, so you can see like, oh, I got a lot of grain from this part of the field, and I go get a lot less from this part, so why is that, and then ideally the computer can do its work, and give you advice for the next year like you should have done it otherwise, yeah, and for next season you have to apply a bit more fertilizer there, or do other treatments, yeah, so that is the idea, so the idea that you become, every year you become more and more precise based on the data, then what is the practice based on the research I've done with two colleagues, farmers in the Netherlands, for example, but also in the UK and US, they widely report a lot of inaccuracies in this, in this, this technology of yield mapping, yeah, so they're also interviews with the designers of those devices they admit that that's very realistic, there could be an error rate of 10%, yeah, so how would you, would you go into a car, which is a 10% error rate, yeah, of not spotting a red light or so, 10% can be also the margin of, yeah, for a farmer, if you have 10% more production of making a good profit or not making a profit at all, yeah, so 10% is quite a lot, so in here is a quote, oh by the way, there is a map, yeah, generated by the field in the, there in the bottom top, and then you can see like the green spaces, there is a lot of yield, so that's good and red is bad, so you should do something different, yeah, but then there is a farmer who says that there's a quote, it's strange, the quicker I drive during harvest, I think the higher the final yield per hectare, yeah, so suddenly because he started driving quicker, per meter there is more, more harvest, which shouldn't be like that, of course, so he says the manufacturer should actually go back to the basis and field, you fix yield mapping, if the basis is not good, fine tuning is of little help, so there's been a lot of fine tuning, increasingly nice, nice maps, etc., all kinds of functionalities, but if the data, yeah, is not good, then that doesn't help a lot, there is another quote, but the gist of it is that it becomes very much real-time, very quick data gathering, but also errors very quickly are generated, yeah, lightning fast, so real-time is nice, but the real-time accuracy, yeah, not real-time errors, okay, so driving speed, crop weather, etc., they all affect accuracy, so what we found is that basically it's not just the technology which ensures accuracy, you just plug in and do the work, there is a key role for the farmer in doing that, like calibrating sensors, having his or her own experience, like thinking, hey, this couldn't be true, I have to look into the data, I have to change the settings, so a key role of the farmer, yeah, to make digital technology in general accurate, yeah, so and that is in contrast with the idea of that technology's kind of inherent, super accurate functions, yeah, there was one farmer who said, yeah, the combined tells the truth, that was a more optimistic farmer, some more negative, and it also, it is not, it kind of problematizes the negative view of the farmer, like in one of those movies, like that the farmer is kind of the weakest component in agriculture, in digital agriculture, yeah, so farmers have an active role, they have to develop a feeling for error, what to look for when calibrating and using technologies, yeah, so going to the last part, there is a danger of being precisely inaccurate, yeah, it looks very precise, but there are all kinds of errors hidden underneath, and then you are put at ease, like you're so impressed as a farmer, okay, that should be good, and if you then not go to the field anymore to look yourself be critical, that could increase the failures, yeah, the chance for risks, so there is that danger of what we call a precision trap, that you are so excited about the idea of sophistication, there are not anymore checks and balances, like looking, weighing, controlling, just with analog means, yeah, the other aspect is data capture and surveillance, and the proponents say there is a lot of empowerment of the farmer, the world at his or her fingertips, yet farmers are not massively embracing lots of new digital technology, a few selected ones, so one of the proponents said it's strange, like every fund thinks digital agriculture is sexy except the farmer himself, yeah, so if all those active providers consult and they think this is the future, and the farmers are saying hello, so the question is who will really benefit of this data-driven agriculture, definitely a lot of the value lies in the data itself, yeah, a lot of scientists about social scientists, political scientists about data and the platform economy show data is the new gold, the new oil of the economy, but the farmers have to make the big investments, they are the producers of the data, yeah, so are we moving to a kind of surveillance farm, in the words of Klaus, where all kinds of people accept the farmer, are nudging the farmer what to do, yeah, and food traders know exactly the harvest coming up from the farmers, having an ads in negotiations, price negotiations, these are risks which are there, yeah, the one case is of John Deere, those tractors are sealed, yeah, digitally locked, so farmers normally can repair their tractors, they cannot do that, it's all locked, yeah, digitally, they need to stick with the code from the help desk somewhere in the city, yeah, so when they're stuck in the middle of the prairie in the U.S., after the help desk has closed, yeah, and then they are standing there and they cannot do anything, yeah, and it might seem like since fiction, but John Deere can remotely disable and stop the combines they have sold to any farmer, yeah, maybe a few years ago or maybe now it seems side fiction, but for example the Russians, when they occupied Ukraine, I did a lot of research in that area, they stole quite a lot of combines and then those John Deere combines, they were digitally stopped, so they couldn't be used anymore, now you think in this case nice maybe, but it might be a bit scary that someone in an office somewhere can just lock down tractors in other parts of the world, yeah, and what if it would be hacked, yeah, so there are problems around data capture and surveillance, also about workers, finally about sustainability, yeah, will digital technologies, I pose it more as a question in terms of time, will it be solution for the many environmental challenges, would it be a kind of utopia like this, like technology nicely coinciding with nature, small scale, biodiverse, the all kinds of crops, or is it more like this, yeah, increased monoculture and destruction, thank you. All right, thank you very much Oana Visser for your talk, I think you gave a really interesting overview what's happening already and but also the risks that we have to be aware of, there's no time to ask questions anymore, so keep them for the end, then we have plenty of time for you for your questions, so for now the next speaker, it's Amanda Causton, she is assistant professor of philosophy here at Tilburg University, especially her focus is political philosophy and the ethics of violence and non-violence and she also addresses topics in animal ethics as well and today she will give a small talk about an ethical critique actually into a lab grown in vitro meat posing that it's not actually an ethical solution, so please give a big applause for Amanda Causton. All right, can you hear me all right, it's working? Great, thanks, thanks very much for the invitation, very pleased to be here, I wanted to start off by saying I'm a philosopher, surprise, but my initial training actually right out of high school was biotechnology, I was going to save the world's problems by science and technology, very motivated by the potential of science and technology to make the world a better place, I still think that, so it's not like I changed my mind on that, I did move away from biotech, partly I couldn't articulate it at the time but a bit of a frustration with how to think about some of these problems, in particular a lot of them seem to be of our own making, the problems that we were trying to fix and I suspected that part of the underlying problem was how we think about the world, how we think about how to treat each other, that that generated a lot of the problems that we then tried to use technology to fix. So I'm happy to be here today to share how I think philosophy adds something to that story, how it can complement our efforts in science and tech to get a clear view of our problems and their sources. Today I am going to look at a particular focus on a specific technology that has been touted as one of the solutions to a problem and dig into it a little bit from a philosophical perspective. So this is in vitro meat is my topic for today. First of all, what is it? What are we talking about? It's also called cultured meat sometimes or lab meat or part of a cellular agricultural movement. It's the production of meat products via tissue culture technology. Here is a helpful infographic about what this consists of. You start with a live animal, a pig for example, and take a biopsy. The animal still lives. This is a relatively painless procedure. Extract some muscle tissue, some cells, and then use some enzymes and other treatments to convert those into stem cells. Or you can use embryonic cells instead of this biopsy procedure. And then you proliferate them. This is the lab part. Either in a big tank currently that's being worked on right now, but that's the idea. You mass produce these cells. Then you want them to look a certain way and act a bit like muscle cells so you would place them on some scaffolding. This trains them so they become more muscle-like. And then there's of course processing. The results still need to be mixed with other materials, dyes, additives, etc. to get something that looks like meat at the end of the day. This is not science fiction. This is really at least at some level happening. At least a 20-year history so far. In 2002 the first lab grown meat was eaten. This isn't a very small scale. They had one petri dish size of meat and it was goldfish tissue initially. Apparently that's easier to grow, I don't know. 2008 PETA, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, Animal Rights Organization actually offered a $1 million prize to the first company to produce lab-grown chicken meat by 2012. So they're really on board with this movement. 2013 the first lab-grown beef burger was produced and eaten in London. This one burger was incredibly expensive. Again the amount of energy and effort to produce a burger's worth of meat is quite substantial. And today there are in the last five years or so quite a lot of corporate interest in investment in making this work. There's a couple of companies if you're interested in to look up what they're offering. Now of course why develop this? You might already have guessed what some of the proposed benefits are of producing meat in this way instead of the old-fashioned way of in an animal first. So there's lots of, the motivation here is a lot of ethical benefits of producing meat in this way. I thought I would show you this screenshot. This is from the Just Eat Just, or was it Just Eat? I get it mixed up each time. They produce this good meat product or they're aiming to and this is a slide from their website. I'm not being sponsored by them, I just thought it showed it well. And this really captures what their message is why this is such a good thing. So we'll always eat meat. To share the planet together we have to do it differently and they claim to produce or be able to produce meat without harm. Harm here meaning of course harm to the animals involved in meat production but also you can see from the picture they're suggesting environmental damage associated with regular livestock farming and also human health as well. So I'm going to summarize briefly what some of the common ethical arguments are around the production of this in vitro meat. These focus around these three main themes are sort of human health, the planet and animals. On the human health side of things, in vitro meat has been thought of as a way to better control and protect humans from certain zoonotic diseases. These are diseases that move between different species so you're taking different, you can control their environment a lot better and test products before they're consumed. You would reduce or even eliminate the need of using antibiotics in industrial farming. You could also, I mean the lab is this wonderful place, you can control so many things that perhaps you could even control the cholesterol level in the meat product or tweak different nutrition factors of the final product. Sounds all good. A couple quick things. It's currently quite expensive these meat products, I mean it's still very much in a development stage but it is incredibly expensive so the extent to which these health benefits would be enjoyed by humans in general this would not be possible as it's going to be rich people who would be able to enjoy these benefits. And as I mentioned there's still a lot of processing that happens. It's not just sort of pure meat tissue that is produced. It's mixed again with additives and dyes and other stabilizers and things to produce a final product that looks and tastes and smells texture is something recognizable so it's that might reduce the sort of health benefit picture of such meat. On the planet side of things it's celebrated as a way to reduce the carbon output associated with the production of meat. You don't need to cut down rainforest to make pasture for livestock. This looks like a really good reason to pursue in vitro meat. Currently this is not been achieved so the current productions they've not been scaled up yet. Again they're still at development stage but it's currently still quite energy intensive the production of such products. And on the animal side this is perhaps one of the most motivating points for me. You eliminate the slaughter of animals. You just need a biopsy or embryonic cells. You don't need to kill any animals to produce this meat. You eliminate or at least reduce the suffering that's involved in the production of meat from the animal side. And one of these companies even suggested it enables us to have a respectful attitude. There's still lurking problems though with this claim and that's the growth medium that the cells need to multiply and grow has traditionally relied on what's called fetal bovine serum which is what it sounds like. It's a serum produced from the blood of fetal bovines, baby cows. And they've had a really hard time finding an alternative that is not derived from that source. So currently there have been one of two companies that have claimed that they have an alternative but from what I've read maybe we'll find out later if this is true that this is an unsubstantiated claim or not quite perfect yet. But this so this is still currently a problem. Okay now this quick overview and the problems that I've hinted at so far in terms of the success of these ethical benefits of in vitro meat a lot of these problems you could think of as as technical problems. Like yeah it's currently expensive, yeah it's energy intensive, but these are technical problems that with more more research, more study we can scale up and we can address these problems. These are not necessarily insurmountable. I want to raise one more problem though an ethical problem which I don't think is the same kind of thing it's not solvable with just more technology and that's a concern for our attitudes. Okay so as Hannah said in her introduction my aim here is to suggest that despite all these proposed ethical benefits I think there are serious ethical costs and risks associated with producing something like in vitro meat. So I want to say that in vitro meat actually fails to address one of the fundamental problems with meat eating and therefore does fail to be a satisfactory ethical solution to the problem of meat eating. I'm going to do two things. First I'm going to try and say what I think this fundamental problem is with meat eating and suggest it lies in the attitudes that it expresses towards animals and second step I want to show that those attitudes are retained when we move from traditional meat to in vitro meat and therefore we have not solved the problem. All right I should maybe preface this by saying I don't want to discount the incredible benefits of reducing or eliminating slaughter of animals and suffering. Those are important things. I'm not going to say that those count for nothing but they don't count for everything and I worry that there will be problems in other areas if the attitude problem is not addressed. All right so quick two line summary of animal welfare ethics. Animal welfare ethics traditionally has centered on two main avenues or questions issues related to how we might think about animals ethical status. So we might be concerned about animals having certain rights and that might be why it's morally wrong to treat them in certain ways either to eat them or use them in scientific experimentation or in other ways. It might be that might be wrong because they have rights not to be used in that kind of way or and or you might be interested in suffering that what is morally wrong with certain practices is the pain and suffering that creatures undergo or experience as part of that process. And on this on either of these routes it actually looks quite plausible that something like in vitro meat solves these problems right. If animals have rights not to be killed or eaten or mistreated we're not doing that anymore with in vitro meat. We take a small biopsy it's really hard to say that that would be against violating a right and same with suffering we would be if we can get rid of the fetal bovine serum part we would be eliminating the suffering criticism of meat production. So an ethical front this looks promising but my first goal here is to show you that there might be something more another feature that's ethically or sort morally relevant to our evaluation here. I'm going to do that by talking about two problems. One is to give you an analogy that might prompt your intuitions to think that there's something more and one discussion of eating people it's not what you think so hang on be talking about philosophical claims about why we don't eat people. So these are going to show I hope why we think there's something in addition to concerns about rights or concerns about suffering. So I'm going to start with the analogy so here's that the first this is that the current suggestion of moving from traditional meat to meat star so this is how philosophers talk sometimes in vitro meat. If we do this move we eliminate animal suffering that's currently required to produce meat so tick on the suffering side no animals rights are violated so tick we've got rights covered. We've even got a sort of pragmatism point here covered in that and we hear this frequently it's unlikely that everyone's going to adopt vegetarianism so given that sort of practical reality if you're concerned about animal ethics then meat moving to meat star to in vitro meat will avoid this sort of practical problem that humans aren't going to get on board with vegetarianism. So without meat star people are still going to eat meat animals will still suffer so we should go to in vitro meat. Okay so here's the analogy so this is the current structure let's look at another example that follows the same structure. Let's talk about child pornography as one does on a Thursday afternoon. So imagine we suggest moving from child pornography to digital child pornography cp star so and this is this is technically possible in lots of ways today as well so we produce pornography that looks like children are involved but it's produced artificially through digitalized images. If we do that no child will suffer in the production of that pornography of course the suffering of children in production is a frequent criticism of why child pornography is bad no children's rights will be violated if no one specific images are used it's a generic image for example and we have a pragmatism point here as well that despite our concerted efforts to eradicate child pornography it persists and perhaps we should pursue alternatives that address the current suffering that continues on without this alternative that's available that we could make available. Okay so what I'm hoping here is that your intuitions on the child pornography example are there's something still wrong with digital child pornography I might recognize the reduced suffering but there's still something wrong about people looking at children in this kind of way so these are structurally equivalent but the second I suspect many of you find morally abhorrent it permits and encourages thinking of children in a certain way as objects for one's sexual gratification which we think in general as a way of thinking about children is wrong and I think this example helps to motivate the idea that our attitudes how we think about a group or an individual that that matters and I'm hoping that this supports the similar view in the first case as well about in vitro meat our attitudes about animals might still be what matters and I think the burden here is on supporters of in vitro meat to say what's relevantly different about these two cases if you want to think no in vitro meat is still fine you need to say what is different between these two cases okay so that's an analogy now onto the eating people point Cora Diamond pictured here wrote a fascinating paper in 1978 called eating meat and eating people and she asks us to think about we don't eat people why is that and it's not because of rights or concerns about suffering we don't not eat people because of we'd be violating some of their rights or concern about suffering it's it's something else and she thinks it's because it's a consequence of thinking about people in a certain way having this fellow creature response she talks about his opening story she I think it's Orwell who talks about this naked soldier story fighting in the war got the rifle out waiting for enemies to appear enemy soldier pops up but they were caught off guard and they have their pants down because they were going to the loo as it were and is running across in a panic with their trousers around their ankles and Orwell notes it suddenly is a human it's suddenly not an enemy soldier some abstract entity that I can kill it's a it's a fellow human that suddenly it becomes really difficult to shoot at and this is the difference between an enemy soldier who is killable and having this fellow it's a fellow creature that's a human that I can't have I can't it's not so killable anymore and that's why that's the connection for why we don't eat people they're not edible that's not what we do to humans that we see as as humans as part of our fellow creature hood this fellow creature response and she describes it is this feeling of being in a certain boat as it were as our fellows in mortality in life on this earth and that's not having that feeling towards animals is what makes them edible for us and distinguishes animals from humans we don't see animals this way and that's why they are edible we see them as edible almost done if you're concerned about time all right so this sense of animals as being edible as opposed to humans this lack of a fellow creature feeling this problematic attitude that I'm talking about this is retained when we move from traditional meat to in vitro meat animals are still thought of as edible that's the whole point of in vitro meat why are plant meats not enough there's lots of great alternatives available made from plants why the push for though those aren't enough we need we need alternatives made from animals specifically um the response is well those aren't real meat what I need is actual from an animal because it's animals that are edible and that's what's kept constant from the move from traditional meat to in vitro meat so developing in vitro meat perpetuates the view that animals are edible it doesn't force us to confront this lack of a fellow creature feeling it continues yet it's really important to grow this kind of cell culture because animals are for eating so this blocks the fellow creature response I do think sort of as a consequence of this lack of a fellow creature feeling towards animals does mean that animals will still be eaten so the production of in vitro meat doesn't I don't think will mean that there won't be animals slaughtered still for eating I think there'll be your in vitro meat option for some people and a luxury meat option for wealthy people in the same way that we currently have the differentiation between fake leather and real leather or fake fur and real fur the real fur the real leather these are the expensive high status options right the introduction of fake fur or fake leather has not eliminated the production of fur or leather and this absence of a fellow creature feeling for animals which is tied to the thinking of them still as edible I think will enable their continued poor treatment in other domains like in scientific testing in sports and disrespect for their habitat needs etc okay so just to quickly wrap up I wanted to say the point here is to say in vitro meat does not address this problem despite all the sort of other ethical tick boxes that it manages to address it does not address the fundamental problem with me eating and in that case I think it fails to be an ethical solution I do want to suggest at this last stage a sort of stronger claim not only does it not address it I think it actually helps hide this problem from us so it actually makes the problem worse that we think we can be good animal lovers and eat this meat without recognizing we've not changed our attitudes really towards animals so it conceals this crucial ethical dimension by leaving our attitudes unscrutinized and finally just a general comment perhaps on the general theme of technology and food or any human challenge I do think many many problems of course have technical and ethical aspects and we do need to investigate how these interact with each other and how they're co-produced and remember of course that many ethical problems are are tied to how we think about others and how that translates into how we treat others and technology can make it easier to confront this dimension or it can make it easier to hide from this dimension of our activities as well so that's it for now thank you very much for your attention all right thank you very much Amanda I think it's really an interesting perspective and a good perspective to you know that people bring this solution up as a really good ethical solution for meeting or eating and also killing animals but that it sometimes is really important to also think further if that's actually the case so and we will address the questions from the audience so if you have any questions yeah raise your hand to be honest I have a lot of questions we are not going to address all of them I guess all speakers are here and yeah okay I can see a few questions already so yeah Julia will give a microphone thank you for the insightful presentation so my question is at the moment the UN has estimated that the world population is heading towards 10 billion by 2050 and we don't have enough arable land to like continue farming for the growing population so there's been an introduction well growing topic of new genome techniques in plant breeding and I'm really curious maybe if any of you can shed some light on that and maybe the sustainable impact of it and your thoughts from your respective backgrounds I would like to I'm wondering if you have any insights to share on new genome techniques in plant breeding from your various backgrounds and how maybe that relates to sustainability because it's like a new innovation in agricultural technology and it's I think it's sustainable so I'm curious if you have encountered any topics or any discussions regarding it and how it can help like you mentioned for instance the economic challenges as well as agriculture and it's a lack of land right yes because how to solve this yeah so I think I have a couple remarks first the statement that our assumption that there is not enough land with normal crops that is still I wouldn't necessarily agree with that because there is still a lot of space to increase production with without GMOs because there are lots of big parts of the world where there is a huge gap between what is being produced and what could be produced so I see some problems with the very optimistic views which sometimes is given that GMOs GMO plans will be solve all those problems because one is that often farmers become then super dependent on a few companies who have those patented GMO plans and they are entering a kind of technological treadmill so normally they can reproduce their own own plants their own seeds they are not able to do that often the farmers are lured into that with subsidized seed yeah so it's it seems to be low cost and they enter it and once they are used to it and they are not able anymore they've forgotten how to reproduce the seed prices go up and they cannot keep up with it so to me it's not often it's not such a sustainable solution as as proposed and you see for example in in India yeah huge farmer suicides for example they are getting indebted and dependent thank you we had another question yeah thank you first of all thank you to all the speakers for speaking here today and I had a question for the second presenter yeah so if I was to correctly your perspective was that the fundamental issue of seeing animals as being there for slaughter and for consumption is the main issue with the labrone meat and so I wanted to ask kind of regarding the scenario that popped into my head with a plant-based meat that right now the texture is still not fully there it's obviously still plant meat but if in the future in a couple years a couple decades the plant-based meat improved and it looked exactly like a normal steak would would that be a possible solution to the fundamental issue that you brought up or would the fact that the source is different still not necessarily solve it because the fact that it looks exactly like real meat would still kind of demeans the life of the animal that's it excuse me very good question I grapple with this myself so I do think what really matters is like if someone gave me what looked like a steak what would really matter to me that it's not actually from an animal it can look and taste perhaps differently but it's really important to me that it's not from an animal I do think a lot of the plant-based meats there's a market for things looking a familiar way and being acceptable with very new friends and family that they'll eat it too so I think it doesn't necessarily have it doesn't it's importantly doesn't have the animal connection right that's what that's a selling feature it tastes certain ways but it's not from an animal and I think that that's really important the familiarity with certain kinds of textures tastes or you know food is very culture-based of what you expect to see on a plate that's quite a complex series of concerns so I think it would be okay I think that would help break the again as long as it's what is the selling feature about it is that it tastes great and everything it's not an animal and that's why you want this food I do have other problems with plant-based meats just because they're so resource intensive and we could be a very inefficient way of using that plant material but as a go-between it's okay thank you does anyone else has any question because I actually have a question for Julia so you talked how this artificial milk is produced and if we want to mass produce how much resources do we actually need for that because when people talk about sustainability I think many times they don't take into account how much data requires resources of storing analyzing and like even to have the labs like this do you mean resource respect to research or for the input of no if you actually mass produce yeah artificial meat or like you of course know more about dairy products but if you mass produce it like how much resources are we talking about oh that depends I think once you scale you can be more and more effective at the moment if you have a mini fermenter like really small tiny things that I saw with my collaborators and you also have a lot of ways because you're not really precise in producing I think once it's scaled you need not much land to place the fermenter it can be anywhere in a I don't know in the basement somewhere so it's independent of the climate so you can also put it in the arc because if you like but the resources for the feed are still high so that's I cannot say a number for this the input is necessary for you need nitrogen and carbon to grow or the gas or anything else to grow the microbes um since I'm not the fermenting fermentation expert I cannot really say but there are resources necessary yeah yeah and do you think that it would be like also produced by companies or like an ideal case scenario because I know like there are those also sky-five scenarios where every one of us could just like produce any product for ourselves yeah I could imagine more that maybe farmers are producing it having fermenters on their farms producing maybe sugar beads and then the sugar just goes directly in keeping the transport as low as possible to leave everything on site and then happy animals around it which still have existence and yeah but there there are these ideas how this could look like in the future yes so talking about the farmers in on presentation that was a very nice model of digital innovation right but I can imagine that there are like a few countries that actually lead this innovation but what about those countries that actually kind of left behind like what is the gap and how can we bridge this gap between countries that actually lead this technology innovation and what kind of left behind yeah you see that is of course the US and the EU they are leading it and a bit in Japan so we see that there are there is now a drive to develop also a kind of digital agriculture for the global south for example in Africa and Asia and then it's much more it's not about combines and tractors and milk robots but it's more like cell phone based like information via platforms and through cell phones so they get information and sometimes combined with for example soil sensors so that is emerging but yeah there is a huge gap and also within the west there is a big gap yeah some farmers have the resources to do it and if they are the front runners they get subsidies and etc and for others it's much more difficult to do that yeah so there are big gaps both within the west and across the world yeah so do you actually think that this technology making this gap bigger or like smaller especially like I mean for example with artificial meat right it costs like a lot so do we actually just increasing the gap between those people who can afford like to eat like good food right or biological food or it's opposite the proponents okay so like countries in Africa do what they call them yeah like leapfrogging yeah they can skip for example with cell phones they skip the base the the phase of land lines and get immediately to cell phones so that is the positive take on it but if you look for example like who really gets the value of this who makes money then most of these platforms which are now operating in Africa that it's like private equity from from London from the U.S. and then one I studied in Paksim Agana says like it's digital agriculture for Africans by Africans but if you look a little bit further then it's all western money for example thank you and I know we are running out of time so I will just ask the last question for Amanda so how do you think like when technology goes wrong right who is actually liable for that or who would be like maybe from ethical point of view right is it like those who produce or like for example farmers who use it so how do you think how can we address this issue because like yeah if no one knows what's going on like who would be responsible when things go wrong do you mean wrong as in like there's a big accident yeah yeah something like that yeah yeah this is actually something you raised I think in your talk with the the language the wording that that is chosen reminded me that like you got a university public funds but this is also a corporate market right so I do think responsibility is an important question and maybe to help think about who is involved with developing the technology from like a research standpoint and then what happens with it on the market food is obviously an important market in a capitalist society but it doesn't have to be treated as sorry this is going bigger I should maybe stick to this original question it was important to be clear on that at the beginning right so there's a legal framework but there's also you might be morally responsible these things can come apart but yeah you don't want to have a problem and then start wondering where to point fingers so to be clear about where it lands yeah to address it in advance but there will always be surprises right of things you hadn't anticipated definitely definitely so thank you very much to all our speakers I think Hannah will give the last word yeah thank you very much and we hope we addressed all your questions thank you all right definitely I think we have to all right a really quick one then so um dr viscer said something about yield mapping how like the with the AI you can predict the how much yield you're going to get from the farm and I assume that is used by the farmers to forecast like the prices and then to compete with the foreign market or like the other competitors but what do you think about the future of like this technology when when it's used with the platform because from where I'm from I'm from South Korea and they use when they use like these kind of big data data driven technologies with the platform like they usually go downhill like to give an example we have a equivalent of dyes resort in the Netherlands where they use big data to predict like the what the customers want and how to gain more customers based on the advertisements and not many after some while after using them restaurants stopped using them because the amount of money that they were paying to the platform was way more than what they were gaining from actually using that technology and uh people like the restaurant owners started boycotting and um yeah after a while like the business uh with that big data like uh went downhill so what's your opinion like you said uh those data driven technologies can either lead to a do more like a really nice uh optimistic future but sorry what's your personal opinion on that sorry to interrupt you but we're really over time so uh I think we should uh answer this question I mean it's like in one sentence like I mean it's fine yeah there are definitely big big big risk so um what I think that with these technologies it's all about the political constellation around it yeah whether it will benefit the farmers and us as consumers or it will benefit just a group of big tech platforms and providers so the technology it's more about who what is the business model behind it is it more open source is it a few big tech farms that is in the end uh super important thank you I don't know if speakers are going to stay like for a few minutes so if you really have any questions maybe you can come up later and ask them directly so I will give a floor to Hannah so now for real of course um we really have to end it here thank you all for listening it was really great that you're that you were here also for uh our online listeners thank you for for being here today um and um actually I'll switch this on quickly um if you could fill in this quick one minute qr questionnaire on your way out that would really be great because we can learn a lot from from your experiences so thank you very much and um we'll see you during one of our next events have a nice day