I've just started listening to the book "Brave new world" (no spoilers please!) and this is literally how the book begins (but with humans) - what could possibly go wrong!
No spoilers, but I used to think, along the lines of Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.
Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.
I haven't read Brave New World but "We" by Evgeny Zamyatin left a similar impression on me, it's more subtle than 1984. It came out earlier than both books by the Western authors - even though Zamyatin was inspired while working in England in early 20th century.
There was a good theatre adaption of The Machine Stops by a UK group called Pilot Theatre (I saw it at York). They performed it as a live Youtube broadcast during the faf of 2020, though I can't see it listed anywhere now. Worth having a look for if you have better sources than mine. I must have a scan of my media array later, to see if I downloaded a copy I can rewatch.
Thank you, that was new to me. I always felt a connection between those three books — We, Brave New World, 1984 — but this review really is the missing piece. He opens the review by describing the similarities between We and Brave New World, closes the review contrasting them politically. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head, it feels like this review is an early treatment for 1984.
1984 is a much better book. The writing is beautiful and the story is gripping. For that reason alone, it occupies a larger part of society’s psyche. I agree that many aspects of Brave New World were prescient, but 1984 isn’t entirely inaccurate either.
Actually.. not much. Education is taken care of.
Gestation is taken care of.
You grow up your young with a company instead of a family, if you want to be involved at all. All things that could go wrong, already sort of have over the last ten years and have been accordingly ironed out of humanity.
Sexuality as couples is already gone for large parts of the yoynger population.
Culturally the family is as good as gone. Woman have kicked themselves enthusiastically out of all roles the species had to offer, except for that of work drone and that is going obsolete right now. They and their allies (almost all of those allies cheer on the ideas of incubators) wildly detest the idea of going back to traditional roles. Society has to come from somewhere and this is somewhere.. nothing of value was lost..
> says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the research. “We could better help millions of birds every year by solving the more immediate threats of disappearing habitats, collisions with building windows, and prowling outdoor cats,”
Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.
Colossal Biosciences has other ongoing projects including reviving the "Red Wolf" using DNA from coyote/wolf hybrids and CRISPR. They also want to introduce a Wooly Mammoth/elephant hybrid.
The company was founded by George Church, and is able to embark upon these projects thanks to deep-pocketed investors and skirting/bypassing traditional approaches aligned with federal programs and the Endangered Species Act. The following MIT Technology Review article covers the wolf project in detail:
Or the South American terrorbirds, the extant species are tiny, seriemas, and they're very interesting. I bet one that weighs 700 pounds would be even more exciting
Yes, first they'll focus on normal dodos. Then, they'll try very large Dodos. After that, very, very ancient dodos. Followed by island dodos. Then they might set up a whole island that people can visit, full of all kinds of dodos. They'll do tours with self driving cars so people can see all the dodos from a safe distance.
It's been a while since high school biology class, and I can't ask my sister right now, but I don't think humans are born in eggs. What does an artificial egg hatching chickens have to do with cloning humans?
Technically speaking, we could engineer it in a way where humans are born from eggs. It would just have to be a very big egg and would also have to continue growing in an incubator after hatching much like chickens rather than the standard womb senario.
Surely the rarity is partially due to the velociraptor skeleton cartel limiting the supply. And really, a velociraptor skeleton wasn't even a traditional engagement gift until they created the demand for it with that advertising campaign back in the day.
It could end the abortion issue if fertilized eggs could be moved early enough. Any woman who didn't want a baby could have it transferred to an artificial womb and sign away all rights to/responsibility for it. Any father who wanted their child when the mother didn't could keep it. It could help premature infants too.
That's very likely to be the future of the human race where governments produce, train and push out artificial humans like a factory. Well if we don't solve aging and robotics by then, then we'll probably just stop having babies altogether or at least not in a quantity that matters.
If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.
Perhaps some gene editing to give them 'blue' skin, some non-historically-biased-color to identify them.
Really. There are ton of books with these themes already. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said, and now a company is doing it, so why am I getting downvoted.
> If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.
We could but maybe we don’t? Slavery is pretty inefficient. If South Korea could mass produce people, I’m pretty sure the government would be happy with just letting them be normal members of society instead of some kind of Smurf slave caste for a populace vanishing from demographic collapse.
Fiction is nice when you want to speculate on “what if …” but reality is infinitely more complex.
Eggs are simpler than Wombs. Chickens are simpler than Humans. Of course we have to solve the simpler things first. Of course, this is leading along the same path as occurs in Brave New World. We have to be able to grow chickens before we can move on to humans.
We already have cloning. But have lacked being able to do it without implanting the egg into a female. This is just getting us closer.
Baby steps. That the dystopia isn't happening today doesn't mean we aren't working on it.
Yeah but there's also the book where we make people in a lab and they're great and everyone lives happily ever after forever. Don't cherry-pick your data.
So I'm not providing a good literary survey of books with similar tropes and providing some of the positive ones? There are literally half dozen very famous negative examples, but I didn't do good enough search to find a positive one?
That would be like every comment on AI should include some example from The Culture Series as an example that all this AI stuff could great.
No man, it's just that saying "this scenario is popular because it makes for a good story therefore it'll happen in reality" is an absurd point to make.
Taking scientific breakthroughs and extrapolating and/or comparing to Science Fiction? Shock, clutch my pearls, who would do such a thing. The absurdity. Surely nobody has done this before.
Sure. If you take all of Science Fiction, if you want, take all of Literature. And compare it to everything that actually has happened. Then Fiction has guessed at more things than have actually happened. So, a poor predictor.
Not sure what that point is proving. We shouldn't look at fiction for any inspiration or cautionary tales? Just shut up and calculate?
The point is proving that "chickens now, maybe humans later" is just an extremely poor predictor. It's a useless disapproval of a new technology based on "hey, you can't prove it won't happen!".
What is "it", exactly? I have probably read some of the same dystopian science fiction novels as you have. But this is Jurassic Park, not A Brave New World.
In one of the movies, they did clone a human, they just didn't lean into that story line. It was treated as a one-off, but the same science allowed both. (in the fictional story)
The point isn't that we'll have humans tomorrow. Just that this one step. We'll need to solve problems on simpler animals first. An egg is easier than a womb, a chicken is easier than a human. It's the start.
So yes. Brave New World isn't today. But its obvious this technology is on the same path.
At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.
Factory farming refers to a wide set of practices that range from loathsome to banal.
I don't see how the use of this technology makes factory farming any worse than it already is. Maybe it saves male chicks from the shredder, making it slightly less loathsome.
scientists inspect eggs newly laid by real hens within 24 to 48 hours. They select the most promising ones, crack them open, and delicately pour the contents—everything but the shell—into the artificial egg structure. But everything that happened before then, from fertilization to egg laying, required a real chicken.
Am I the only one wondering if it's 26 chickens at once from a single artificial egg or they just succeeded 26 times with different eggs? Rationally it probably has to be the latter, but the title confuses me.
(26 different artificial eggs. The artificial egg is the main development. Basically they take a chicken embryo (by cracking open a fertilized egg) and allow it to develop inside the artificial egg, and from which it can eventually be "hatched". Other methods for growing chickens from embryos outside their eggs have not had very high success rates.)
This article is so strange. It is written by the company, but written in a way that an outsider would write.
> Colossal has not released its hatch rate for the 26 chickens, which limits direct comparison to prior shell-free systems. The announcement was also made without an accompanying peer-reviewed paper or publicly released dataset, meaning independent scientists have not yet been able to evaluate the underlying methodology.
So the question of what came first is answered then?
I've just started listening to the book "Brave new world" (no spoilers please!) and this is literally how the book begins (but with humans) - what could possibly go wrong!
No spoilers, but I used to think, along the lines of Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.
Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.
No spoilers, but I've come to think that "Brave New World" actually is Utopian—in the "give people what they want" department.
I haven't read Brave New World but "We" by Evgeny Zamyatin left a similar impression on me, it's more subtle than 1984. It came out earlier than both books by the Western authors - even though Zamyatin was inspired while working in England in early 20th century.
The book "The Machine Stops" was posted here a a while back it's a 100 years old and just as prescient as "Brave New World" and "1984". https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/...
I will look up We.
There was a good theatre adaption of The Machine Stops by a UK group called Pilot Theatre (I saw it at York). They performed it as a live Youtube broadcast during the faf of 2020, though I can't see it listed anywhere now. Worth having a look for if you have better sources than mine. I must have a scan of my media array later, to see if I downloaded a copy I can rewatch.
Thank you I will look for it.
Funnily enough, Orwell actually reviewed We in 1946: https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/zamyatin/english/e_zamy
Thank you, that was new to me. I always felt a connection between those three books — We, Brave New World, 1984 — but this review really is the missing piece. He opens the review by describing the similarities between We and Brave New World, closes the review contrasting them politically. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head, it feels like this review is an early treatment for 1984.
mephi
1984 is a much better book. The writing is beautiful and the story is gripping. For that reason alone, it occupies a larger part of society’s psyche. I agree that many aspects of Brave New World were prescient, but 1984 isn’t entirely inaccurate either.
1984 was as much (or more) about Stalinism and totalitarian tendencies in 1948 as it was a cautionary tale about the future.
> Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984.
The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.
Well, it's just like this except that... oh, you said no spoilers :)
Actually.. not much. Education is taken care of. Gestation is taken care of. You grow up your young with a company instead of a family, if you want to be involved at all. All things that could go wrong, already sort of have over the last ten years and have been accordingly ironed out of humanity.
Sexuality as couples is already gone for large parts of the yoynger population. Culturally the family is as good as gone. Woman have kicked themselves enthusiastically out of all roles the species had to offer, except for that of work drone and that is going obsolete right now. They and their allies (almost all of those allies cheer on the ideas of incubators) wildly detest the idea of going back to traditional roles. Society has to come from somewhere and this is somewhere.. nothing of value was lost..
Without spoiling anything, I wouldn’t say anything “goes wrong” in Brave New World, at least as far as procreation is concerned.
> says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the research. “We could better help millions of birds every year by solving the more immediate threats of disappearing habitats, collisions with building windows, and prowling outdoor cats,”
Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.
https://archive.is/FwKsk
Colossal Biosciences has other ongoing projects including reviving the "Red Wolf" using DNA from coyote/wolf hybrids and CRISPR. They also want to introduce a Wooly Mammoth/elephant hybrid.
The company was founded by George Church, and is able to embark upon these projects thanks to deep-pocketed investors and skirting/bypassing traditional approaches aligned with federal programs and the Endangered Species Act. The following MIT Technology Review article covers the wolf project in detail:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/20/1135222/red-wolv... (paywall)
Is this a company and not a research lab doing this? What's the economic imperative for funding this?
They're a foundation working on "de extinction". They want to hatch dodos.
I'm holding out hope we can get the moa birds back in my lifetime.
Or the South American terrorbirds, the extant species are tiny, seriemas, and they're very interesting. I bet one that weighs 700 pounds would be even more exciting
Yes, yes. Dodos.
The endgame of this is Dodos.
Yes, first they'll focus on normal dodos. Then, they'll try very large Dodos. After that, very, very ancient dodos. Followed by island dodos. Then they might set up a whole island that people can visit, full of all kinds of dodos. They'll do tours with self driving cars so people can see all the dodos from a safe distance.
One thing is for sure: they'll still be using a UNIX system
Scientific consensus is that dodos cannot open doors so it’ll be very safe as long as visitors stay in their cars.
They shall spare no expense.
A velociraptor skeleton is worth around $10 million. Hatch a few dozen per year and you’re making great money.
[Colossal Biosciences] has raised over $600 million and carries a valuation exceeding $10 billion.
You're not making a return on that from selling velocirator skeletons. Nor is that sort of money in dodos and maos.
Human cloning on the other hand...
How about a theme park? With velociraptors and other jurassic era animals?
I would pay money for that, it would give Disney a run for their money. Throw in some woolly mammoths and sabertooth tigers as well.
Disney makes more from theme parks than from everything else combined. Dinosaurs would be better than anything Disney has ever made.
It's been a while since high school biology class, and I can't ask my sister right now, but I don't think humans are born in eggs. What does an artificial egg hatching chickens have to do with cloning humans?
Arguably humans are born from large, soft-shelled, ambulatory eggs.
Technically speaking, we could engineer it in a way where humans are born from eggs. It would just have to be a very big egg and would also have to continue growing in an incubator after hatching much like chickens rather than the standard womb senario.
... probably just easier to grow babies in a tube
I mean, if you can make a velociraptor, the skeleton isn't the bit you'll make money on.
And I feel like lab grown Velociraptor skeletons aren't going to fetch $10 million. Rarity and something new to study is part of the value.
Surely the rarity is partially due to the velociraptor skeleton cartel limiting the supply. And really, a velociraptor skeleton wasn't even a traditional engagement gift until they created the demand for it with that advertising campaign back in the day.
Yeah. Imagine how much you can make on live velociraptors.
Maybe short term, pumping out chickens. For food.
Long term, maybe chickens are just the test case and they will pump out human slaves. Replicants.
No. This is a very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest. Do better.
To be fair, artificial womb technology would really mess with society.
It could end the abortion issue if fertilized eggs could be moved early enough. Any woman who didn't want a baby could have it transferred to an artificial womb and sign away all rights to/responsibility for it. Any father who wanted their child when the mother didn't could keep it. It could help premature infants too.
Artificial womb developed decade ago (2016): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb
That's very likely to be the future of the human race where governments produce, train and push out artificial humans like a factory. Well if we don't solve aging and robotics by then, then we'll probably just stop having babies altogether or at least not in a quantity that matters.
"very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest"
1. Take a common trope in fiction and research for a hundred years. With long known commonly linked ramifications.
2. A company actually starts doing it.
3. Suggest a link
4. -> Call it Stupid.
Yeah. Don't worry about it at all. Nothing to see here.
If we wanted to pump out human slaves now, I don't think the main obstacle is that we can't find enough women to bear them.
If they are born of woman, they would be human.
If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.
Perhaps some gene editing to give them 'blue' skin, some non-historically-biased-color to identify them.
Really. There are ton of books with these themes already. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said, and now a company is doing it, so why am I getting downvoted.
> If they are made, we can re-label them as machines and give them lesser rights. And make ourselves feel better about treating them as lower class by some 'justification', like they don't have souls.
We could but maybe we don’t? Slavery is pretty inefficient. If South Korea could mass produce people, I’m pretty sure the government would be happy with just letting them be normal members of society instead of some kind of Smurf slave caste for a populace vanishing from demographic collapse.
Fiction is nice when you want to speculate on “what if …” but reality is infinitely more complex.
Gene editing is a whole different topic. And only the very first one would need to be "born of woman".
Artificial eggs are basically irrelevant to the dystopia you're describing.
Eggs are simpler than Wombs. Chickens are simpler than Humans. Of course we have to solve the simpler things first. Of course, this is leading along the same path as occurs in Brave New World. We have to be able to grow chickens before we can move on to humans.
We already have cloning. But have lacked being able to do it without implanting the egg into a female. This is just getting us closer.
Baby steps. That the dystopia isn't happening today doesn't mean we aren't working on it.
Yeah but there's also the book where we make people in a lab and they're great and everyone lives happily ever after forever. Don't cherry-pick your data.
So I'm not providing a good literary survey of books with similar tropes and providing some of the positive ones? There are literally half dozen very famous negative examples, but I didn't do good enough search to find a positive one?
That would be like every comment on AI should include some example from The Culture Series as an example that all this AI stuff could great.
No man, it's just that saying "this scenario is popular because it makes for a good story therefore it'll happen in reality" is an absurd point to make.
Taking scientific breakthroughs and extrapolating and/or comparing to Science Fiction? Shock, clutch my pearls, who would do such a thing. The absurdity. Surely nobody has done this before.
And they were all about as right as chance!
Sure. If you take all of Science Fiction, if you want, take all of Literature. And compare it to everything that actually has happened. Then Fiction has guessed at more things than have actually happened. So, a poor predictor.
Not sure what that point is proving. We shouldn't look at fiction for any inspiration or cautionary tales? Just shut up and calculate?
The point is proving that "chickens now, maybe humans later" is just an extremely poor predictor. It's a useless disapproval of a new technology based on "hey, you can't prove it won't happen!".
What is "it", exactly? I have probably read some of the same dystopian science fiction novels as you have. But this is Jurassic Park, not A Brave New World.
In one of the movies, they did clone a human, they just didn't lean into that story line. It was treated as a one-off, but the same science allowed both. (in the fictional story)
The point isn't that we'll have humans tomorrow. Just that this one step. We'll need to solve problems on simpler animals first. An egg is easier than a womb, a chicken is easier than a human. It's the start.
So yes. Brave New World isn't today. But its obvious this technology is on the same path.
The future is getting creepier by the day. You know this'll be used in food farming.
Why? The current method is cheap.
Hopefully it changes. Male baby chicks are thrown into grinders. It’s horrendous
At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.
I agree we should focus more on reviving ancient horrors.
like draw and quarter?
We already have Soylent
Creating a food system that is more cruel to animals than what we already have is a very high bar. Not that I doubt we can clear it.
Is that a problem?
If you consider factory farming horrific, then yes
Factory farming refers to a wide set of practices that range from loathsome to banal.
I don't see how the use of this technology makes factory farming any worse than it already is. Maybe it saves male chicks from the shredder, making it slightly less loathsome.
I always knew that egg came first.
Huh… from the original Nat Geo article:
C'mon.
They want to do a Jurassic Park.
Baby steps:)
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could…
How will they resurrect a dodo? Is the idea that they have some DNA somewhere?
The Wikipedia article suggests they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo
WE have one leg from one individual, and so egg fragments, should be doable, but not enough diversity
life finds a way
Am I the only one wondering if it's 26 chickens at once from a single artificial egg or they just succeeded 26 times with different eggs? Rationally it probably has to be the latter, but the title confuses me.
You could RTFA and find out.
(26 different artificial eggs. The artificial egg is the main development. Basically they take a chicken embryo (by cracking open a fertilized egg) and allow it to develop inside the artificial egg, and from which it can eventually be "hatched". Other methods for growing chickens from embryos outside their eggs have not had very high success rates.)
Yeah..., or you could read the rest of the comment section and learn that I have RTFA, but that TFA was changed with one that explains it better:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257929
This was what I read: https://colossal.com/colossal-biosciences-artificial-egg-dod...
This article is so strange. It is written by the company, but written in a way that an outsider would write.
> Colossal has not released its hatch rate for the 26 chickens, which limits direct comparison to prior shell-free systems. The announcement was also made without an accompanying peer-reviewed paper or publicly released dataset, meaning independent scientists have not yet been able to evaluate the underlying methodology.
It says at the bottom:
> This story is based on original reporting by Christina Larson for National Geographic. Read the full feature on National Geographic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/artificia...
Ok, we've switched the URL to that link from https://colossal.com/colossal-biosciences-artificial-egg-dod... above. Thanks!
Press releases are often written for lazy publications to copy and paste.
Also, that is the kind of corporate PR articles that are made to be quasi copy/pasted by journalists.
For a sec there I thought the National Enquirer had gotten a new lease on life.
So, this means the egg came first, right?
Eggs are IaC.
Have we already forgotten about chaos theory?
For a book/movie with a decent (if optimistic) grasp of genetics, its grasp of chaos theory was utterly ignorant.