Feel-good story about the future of vertical farms

[Mangochin]

A foreseen pitfall to applying shiny scientific processes to meat production seen in a workplace comedy:

[orenwolf]

backs away slowly

I am quite happy that I didn’t visit while that song was still in use.

[HMSGoose]

@doctorow

Nobody in the building appears to have an actual office. Employees are distributed in more or less open spaces here and there. In a dim corner of the area with the vertical farm, where the fresh, florist-shop aroma of chlorophyll is strong, young graduates of prestigious colleges confab around laptop screens that show photos of currently germinating seeds and growing leaves. Folding tables burgeon with cables, clipboards, and fast-food impedimenta. David Rosenberg, the C.E.O., who hired Ingrid Williams last year, is the boss. This distinction is hard to notice, because he looks more or less like anybody else.

ugh. When and if they do scale these operations, I hope they don’t think that this kind of working environment is part of the success of day-to-day operations. Unless you really are tending to plants, which it sounds like not many of the employees are, open plan offices an faux-flat hierarchies (really just hidden hierarchies, promotion shenanigans and lack or operational support) can suuuuck outside the startup environment (and inside it, I’m sure)

[HMSGoose]

I enjoyed the shit out of that show.

[Mangochin]

Me too. It was an SF show that didn’t know it was an SF show. Phil and Lem are my favorite mad scientists.

[Jamie]

I’m pretty sure we can’t credit the Ecomodernist movement, which was launched in 2014, with the Green Revolution so I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

Or are you suggesting the Green Revolution is an example of shiny technology? I’d characterise it as steady, rigorous scientific research over the course of decades. Quite a different beast.

[jhertzli]

If the needed energy is generated by nuclear power plants, this might make some sense.

On the other hand, that will aggravate the urban heat-island effect.

[Mangochin]

@Jamie

Or are you suggesting the Green Revolution is an example of shiny technology? I’d characterise it as steady, rigorous scientific research over the course of decades. Quite a different beast.

Yes I am making such a suggestion and making an additional one that the only difference between “shiny” technology and the other kind is simply public awareness. Sometimes all it takes is taking old methods and applying them in a novel fashion to make them seem like something revolutionary.

[Jamie]

But vertical farms aren’t at all revolutionary because they simply won’t meaningfully contribute to global food production. The Green Revolution was aptly named as it revolutionised food production and saved the lives of millions. The two aren’t really comparable imo.

[jsroberts]

@tekna2007

I’m really having trouble with “seeing how many people we can cram on the surface of the planet” as the Great Project of humanity.

Since we don’t have much of a choice about how many children other people have, it’s more like “see how many of the people already existing on this planet we can feed”. I’m not much of a technological optimist, I just think it’s less of a grand project and more of a way to avoid humanitarian disaster. I’d like there to be fewer people, but not that way.

[HMSGoose]

It’s a little unfair to compare the potential of a single early-stage tool to an entire loosely defined set of technological and cultural advances, and discount the former because it doesn’t match the output of the latter…Was any single part of the green revolution, by itself “revolutionary?”