The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.
Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.
Many years past, and early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.
Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.
I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.
There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature.
This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]
For a brief moment I thought this would be about something like robotic polo ponies, and considered the idea that four-legged high agility, high endurance robots had advanced significantly without me noticing.
A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.
Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.
Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.
Many years past, and early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.
Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.
I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.
This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(Javier_Milei%27s_dog)
Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.
Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues.
Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.
I doubt people like Jonas Salk would accept being cloned if they could help it
https://youtu.be/VARJnzhVryc
The stories make me wonder if Argentina is a cloning hotspot, though I may be reading too much into two stories.