Hi Aidan and Aaron — I’ve been independently looking into the China case for in-ovo sexing after seeing it listed among AIM’s animal welfare frontier problems.

My current view is that tractability in China may depend mainly on three things: physical hatchery concentration, compatibility of major commercial crosses with existing high-throughput systems, and the fully loaded cost per saleable pullet.

I’m also wondering whether China’s regulatory environment could make a conventional foreign-funded advocacy NGO relatively difficult to operate, and whether a buyer-led supply-chain technology adoption model might be more tractable instead.

I wrote up my initial thinking here

I’d be very interested to know how far AIM’s research on this problem has progressed, and what you currently see as the main open questions.

What a coincidence! I was just getting annoyed by Financial Times articles that always make up reasons after things happen. It made me realize that most news is exactly what Chomsky calls Manufacturing Consent.

I chatted with an AI about the idea that DNA/RNA arriving on Earth via asteroids is basically a biological Von Neumann machine. So the alien question is actually a strict Existential Risk (X-risk) issue, not a non-pragmatic one.

Also, my first language is Mandarin.