Tech gone wild: harnessing technology to build a better world
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Our Wilberforce Lecture
Last week, the UK Government announced their new strategy to accelerate the phase out of using animals in harmful research. If delivered effectively, this is a significant step forward towards one of the RSPCA’s nine key ambitions and one day ending the suffering of animals in science. Using cutting edge techniques like organs on chips, AI and 3D bioprinted tissue we could supercharge our research industry while potentially transforming the lives of millions of animals used in experiments. But it is also an important signal that, when we work together across policy, industry and animal welfare, we can harness the immense power of technology to build a better society for animals and people.
This was the focus of our annual Wilberforce Lecture last week hosted by broadcaster, journalist and RSPCA Ambassador Kate Quilton. Broadcaster, writer, researcher and RSPCA Vice-President Melanie Challenger, Jane Lawton, Managing Director of the Earth Species Project, which is dedicated to using AI to decode animal communication, and the RSPCA’s Director of Advocacy and Prevention Thomas Schultz-Jagow came together to discuss Technology Unleashed: how can we harness the power of technology to build a better world for animals? The government’s announcement this week is a huge positive sign of what can be achieved with political will and collaboration, but this discussion highlighted the potentially catastrophic unintended consequences of allowing technological progress to go unchecked.
We are animals too
Jane Lawton pointed out that technology is accelerating ‘beyond anything we have seen before’ and that there is no way our ethical stance, let alone our regulatory frameworks can keep up. She said that many of the challenges that we, and animals, are facing, such as biodiversity and the climate crisis, are driven by the fact we’re so disconnected from the rest of nature and that we have ‘forgotten we are part of it, we have forgotten that we are actually animals’.
Melanie agreed that animals are ‘deeply disenfranchised’ and that technology threatened to deepen the welfare challenges they face.
She said: “At the moment, animals are deeply disenfranchised and their lives pass in deeply unjust and non-ideal circumstances and our tech is being developed, conceptualised and rolled out into non-ideal situations, so there’s just as much likelihood, if not more, that tech can end up amplifying the injustice and entrenching some of the welfare challenges that they’re facing, rather than improving them.”
Animal rights vs. AI rights
There were fears that the line between the rights of sentient animals and the rights of AI could become blurred, which risks a further disconnection from animals and our duty to them as a society. Melanie said that the growing discourse around AI welfare ‘means that we’re… seeing synthetic forms of calculations in computers as analogous with what is intelligence or sensitivity or agency in other living beings and that’s not a pathway I think we should be going down’.
Many of the technologies that the panellists were concerned about are already here, such as gene and genome editing to manipulate animals. The RSPCA has warned of the welfare risks of this technology, which, if unregulated, could open the door to pets designed to suit owners’ preferences or farmed animals bred to yield food beyond what their bodies can cope with. It is also being used in so-called ‘de-extinction’ projects with industries raising hundreds of millions of pounds claiming to be able to bring back long-dead species such as the Dire Wolf or the woolly mammoth. This is happening at a time when rapid nature loss and climate change is threatening the lives and habitats of millions of living species around the world.
Jane said that we have to stop thinking of humans as if we are exceptional and that we know best, adding: “We are ignoring the interconnectedness and the complexity of nature and evolutionary processes. It’s another great example of human beings feeling like we know and understand enough to design nature and to control it and that’s fundamentally the mindset we need to change.”
Tech for good
However, there were reasons for optimism. The work of the Earth Species Project has the potential to accelerate our understanding of animals and their communication beyond anything we know already. Jane said that many scientists say that there is no chance animals have language but, she said, ‘every month there are discoveries of what we thought were the hallmark of human language in other animals’.
This opens up the possibility of being able to better understand and even, possibly, in some cases, converse with the animals around us. With that brings the possibility that it could mark a sea change in our relationship with animals creating a new society with animal welfare at its heart.
Thomas spoke about the possibilities around alternative proteins, including the developments of meat, dairy and eggs grown in a laboratory, to be part of a more compassionate food system. But, he warned, we also need to address the cultural resistance to a change in our diets.
Lower welfare farming is the single biggest animal welfare issue we face. There’s no way we can tackle that at scale without reducing the amount of animal products we consume, so, as people want to eat protein, where are the alternatives? We need to be doing more to bring consumers to the recognition that they have a choice to make every day in their food choices. We are hopeful that we will see some positive language in the government’s strategies around supporting and investing in this technology in the near future.
Summing up, the panellists said they were concerned that a failure to keep technology in check could lead to dire consequences. Thomas said he feared ‘more horrible monster breeds on farms and in our homes’ where technology remains unregulated and values and attitudes unchanged. Jane was concerned that we could see amazing scenarios where we can converse with the pets in our homes or the birds in our garden, but that this ‘fundamentally changed nothing about the way we engage with them and that this has entrenched the systems of control and which degrade the health and wellbeing of all life, including our own lives’. Melanie’s greatest fear was the realistic prospect that by 2050 we will have ‘killed the wild’ and produced ‘widespread objectification of other species’.
A hopeful future
All three concluded that, on balance, they were hopeful that we have the power to change the way we use and regulate technology to build a better society for all.
Melanie concluded: “My really hopeful scenario and I have to be honest, I’m more on the hopeful side, would be that we have a new form of civilisation, one that’s democratically inclusive. We have one in which we are more connected to the living world again and one in which we haven’t demoted humans but we’ve lifted up the rest of the living world with us.”
Listen to the discussion in full on the latest edition of the Animal Futures Podcast