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!
mplanchard 5 hours ago [-]
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.
6 minutes ago [-]
JKCalhoun 27 minutes ago [-]
No spoilers, but I've come to think that "Brave New World" actually is Utopian—in the "give people what they want" department.
dimes 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
kombine 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Cassell 4 minutes ago [-]
mephi
aaronbrethorst 1 hours ago [-]
1984 was as much (or more) about Stalinism and totalitarian tendencies in 1948 as it was a cautionary tale about the future.
wartywhoa23 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
warumdarum 4 hours ago [-]
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..
dimes 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ilamont 2 hours ago [-]
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:
The future is getting creepier by the day. You know this'll be used in food farming.
maxerickson 4 hours ago [-]
Why? The current method is cheap.
sghiassy 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully it changes. Male baby chicks are thrown into grinders. It’s horrendous
zamadatix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dullcrisp 2 hours ago [-]
I agree we should focus more on reviving ancient horrors.
yehosef 3 minutes ago [-]
like draw and quarter?
aaronbrethorst 1 hours ago [-]
We already have Soylent
standardUser 2 hours ago [-]
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.
margalabargala 2 hours ago [-]
Is that a problem?
tao_oat 31 minutes ago [-]
If you consider factory farming horrific, then yes
deadbabe 31 minutes ago [-]
How will they resurrect a dodo? Is the idea that they have some DNA somewhere?
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.
yewenjie 5 hours ago [-]
Is this a company and not a research lab doing this? What's the economic imperative for funding this?
jfengel 5 hours ago [-]
They're a foundation working on "de extinction". They want to hatch dodos.
Avicebron 5 hours ago [-]
I'm holding out hope we can get the moa birds back in my lifetime.
jaggederest 2 hours ago [-]
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
hypfer 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, yes. Dodos.
The endgame of this is Dodos.
dandellion 5 hours ago [-]
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.
incognito124 5 hours ago [-]
One thing is for sure: they'll still be using a UNIX system
fontain 5 hours ago [-]
Scientific consensus is that dodos cannot open doors so it’ll be very safe as long as visitors stay in their cars.
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
They shall spare no expense.
fontain 5 hours ago [-]
A velociraptor skeleton is worth around $10 million. Hatch a few dozen per year and you’re making great money.
onion2k 5 hours ago [-]
[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...
ProblemFactory 2 hours ago [-]
How about a theme park? With velociraptors and other jurassic era animals?
jurgenburgen 2 hours ago [-]
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.
MagicMoonlight 1 hours ago [-]
Disney makes more from theme parks than from everything else combined. Dinosaurs would be better than anything Disney has ever made.
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
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?
margalabargala 2 hours ago [-]
Arguably humans are born from large, soft-shelled, ambulatory eggs.
himata4113 4 hours ago [-]
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
stavros 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, if you can make a velociraptor, the skeleton isn't the bit you'll make money on.
bot403 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mauvehaus 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Imagine how much you can make on live velociraptors.
FrustratedMonky 5 hours ago [-]
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.
vitally3643 5 hours ago [-]
No. This is a very stupid and uneducated thing to suggest. Do better.
5 hours ago [-]
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, artificial womb technology would really mess with society.
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.
FrustratedMonky 5 hours ago [-]
"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.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
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.
FrustratedMonky 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jurgenburgen 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Dylan16807 4 hours ago [-]
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.
stavros 4 hours ago [-]
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.
FrustratedMonky 4 hours ago [-]
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.
stavros 4 hours ago [-]
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.
FrustratedMonky 2 hours ago [-]
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.
stavros 2 hours ago [-]
And they were all about as right as chance!
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bushwart 4 hours ago [-]
life finds a way
eutropia 4 hours ago [-]
Colossal Biosciences
and its
goal of resurrecting extinct bird species
"bird species"?
C'mon.
They want to do a Jurassic Park.
yjftsjthsd-h 3 hours ago [-]
Baby steps:)
cbdevidal 1 hours ago [-]
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could…
jeroenvlek 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dag100 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
jeroenvlek 2 hours ago [-]
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:
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.
x-yl 5 hours ago [-]
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
Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.
I will look up We.
The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.
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..
Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.
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)
The endgame of this is Dodos.
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...
... probably just easier to grow babies in a tube
Long term, maybe chickens are just the test case and they will pump out human slaves. Replicants.
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 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.
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.
Artificial eggs are basically irrelevant to the dystopia you're describing.
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.
C'mon.
They want to do a Jurassic Park.
(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.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257929
This was what I read: https://colossal.com/colossal-biosciences-artificial-egg-dod...
> 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.
> 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...