| REGULATING THE FUTURE, COWPOCALYPSE, SPACE WAR, TECHNOLOGY BEYOND If It Keeps Moving, Regulate It The disruption and transformation of existing ways of doing things is partly a matter of technology. But often it's also about disrupting the restrictions imposed by existing political and regulatory regimes. And they don't like being disrupted. So we see Senator Elizabeth Warren calling for hearings about whether Airbnb interferes with the political goal of "affordable housing." And we see something similar in the reaction to blockchain, the computational idea behind Bitcoin. Note the pattern of the regulatory response, which could be pretty accurately compared to sharks circling. "The hardest part of drafting any new regulation is establishing a definition. In fact, most of the policy work is in the definition and there are alarmingly few policy considerations after something is defined as a covered entity. "The definition of cryptocurrency has already proved problematic for regulators. Essentially, to commodities regulators, virtual currency is a commodity. For bank regulators, it is a bank. For securities regulators, it is a security. For those who regulate money transmitters, it is a money transmitter. For the purpose of property taxes, it is a property. Everyone wants a stake in the new world of virtual currency." The digital economy may be "new," but the politics are old. --- The Fake Meat Paradox While a lot of our attention these days has been drawn to technology that's all about information processing, some of the most interesting new developments are in a field regarded as considerably less glamorous: agriculture. Self-driving tractors, strawberry harvesting robots, vertical farming--scroll to the bottom of the center column at RealClearFuture, and you'll see a roundup of just the recent articles and videos we've linked to. All of this continues the long-term trend of growing a lot more food with a lot fewer farm workers. Here's another new development, still very much in its early stages: lab-grown or "cultured" meat, created from laboratory cultures of animal cells. An overview of the possible reception for cultured meat, however, indicates a problem. At this point, the main selling point is that cultured meat is humane. The target market is "guilt-ridden omnivores" who are squeamish about "horrific meat industry practices." But the people most motivated by those considerations are--surprise, surprise--least likely to eat a lot of meat in the first place. The meat-lovers of the world, by contrast, are a lot less likely to feel guilt and could only be motivated to switch to "cultured meat" if it were cheap enough to compete with the traditional kind. For now, it is more expensive by many orders of magnitude. But there is a bigger paradox in the "humane" case for switching to lab-grown meat, which is that this is actually a plan for the mass slaughter of millions of head of cattle. Herds of cattle exist only because of their agricultural use, and if the market for beef on the hoof were ever to disappear, the result would be a kind of bovine genocide as now-unprofitable herds are liquidated. Which doesn't seem quite so humane. --- There's plenty more at our main page, including interesting articles on space lawyers and an orbital arms race with Russia. Is Facebook Ready to Be World's Live News Network?
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Why You Should Believe in the Digital Afterlife Check it all out. --- Beyond RealClearFuture covers a lot of technology that is not just speculative but is very much real and already being put to work, particularly in our left column which lists more current news updates: the controversy over Tesla's autopilot, the Hyperloop lawsuit, and some of the latest robotics and AI ideas being adopted by big corporations. But sometimes we're still going to consider some far-out speculation, particularly in the "Beyond" category at the bottom of the left column. There, for example, you'll find a link to a plan for a fusion-powered airliner. Nothing says "future" like fusion power, which is 15 years in the future and, as they say, always will be. Nothing says "beyond" the future like speculation about what we will do with fusion once we have it. --Rob Tracinski
Editor, RealClearFuture Follow @RealClearFuture on Twitter. Like us on Facebook. Send comments, recommendations, and submissions to rob@realclearfuture.com. | 
