AI tools are getting more powerful every month. With the basic ChatGPT plan, for example, you can now type in descriptions of images and have it output beautiful visualizations in a matter of seconds.
One way that animal advocates can use these tools is to help us all imagine what the future could look like without animal exploitation. Helping ourselves—and the general public—vividly imagine a vegan future could help make it more realistic and attractive to people.
You could make a case that media influences the life directions of at least some portion of the public—for example, people who say they got interested in science due to Bill Nye, or people who got interested in space exploration through shows like Star Trek. Although the exact impacts are difficult or impossible to measure, we could make a strong case that media can help shift mindsets, shift ideas, shift behavior, and ultimately shift society.
In the spirit of imagining a better world for animals, I spent a little bit of time using ChatGPT to visualize some of the things that might exist in the future if we are successful in creating a world without humans exploiting other animals.
Closing the Last Slaughterhouse
If we reach a world without killing animals for food, then there will come a year when we close down the last slaughterhouse. This image marks that day—a day for celebration, but also for somber remembrance of the countless animals who were killed not only here, but in other slaughterhouses around the world.
(ChatGPT has a hard time with text, so the text on the banners in this image is mostly nonsense.)
The World’s Largest Cultivated Meat Production Facility
There are many companies currently working on creating cultivated meat: meat from animal cells that is made without killing animals. The hope is that if people won’t give up eating meat, perhaps we can just learn to create meat using technology and human ingenuity, rather than from killing billions upon billions of animals each year.
Although the cultivated meat industry is small now, if it grows to supply a lot of the world with meat then we will need large cultivated meat production facilities. This image imagines the construction of the world’s largest cultivated meat facility, a place that can feed the world without contributing to animal suffering.
Inside the Cultivated Meat Facility
Currently, cultivated meat is mostly made using brewery-like tanks where cells are grown. This is good for creating ground meat and other things that aren’t whole cuts, but we don’t yet know what it would look like to create whole cuts of cultivated meat at scale. Here’s one ChatGPT interpretation of what the inside of a cultivated meat facility could look like in the future.
Of course, the technologies we develop could look entirely different from this.
Growing Plants to Feed the World
We don’t need to eat animal foods to survive and thrive, so a vegan future doesn’t necessarily have to involve cultivated meat at all. But regardless of whether we continue eating cultivated meat or not, we’ll need lots of nutritious plant foods to feed the world. Most of the world’s monocrop grains (soy, corn, etc.) are fed to animals who we then kill, so eliminating animal slaughter would free up a truly staggering amount of land for other use.
This imagine imagines the future of plant agriculture where we focus on growing a diversity of nutritious plant foods: beans, broccoli, tubers, and more.
(The astute observers among you will notice that many of these crops aren’t growing realistically. But hey, it’s the future, so let’s cut ChatGPT some slack.)
Using Technology to Help Wild Animals
One of the thorniest questions when it comes to the future is how we should approach the question of wild animal well-being. We think that helping humans live healthy, happy lives is a good thing; and if we look hard enough, we’ll also realize that the best world would be one where wild animals live lives that are as good as possible, too.
Although we may never be able to fully “solve” suffering—either for humans, or wild animals—there are small steps we could take towards helping other species live well and die with as little extreme suffering as possible.
This image shows the use of technology applied to helping injured wild animals. Using large robots like this to help injured animals might not be the most realistic or most scalable solution, but it conveys an ethic of care that is too often missing from current discussions of wild animals.
Additionally, the improvement of artificial intelligence tools will open up all kinds of possible solutions—including the use of autonomous medical robots to help injured or sick animals, as well as advanced monitoring systems that track ecosystems for suffering animals.
Space Colonization, Without Animal Exploitation
Will humans ever colonize space? There is certainly a powerful and influential segment of society that is working towards space colonization, although any kind of scaled-up space colonies are decades or hundreds of years away from being a reality.
If humans do eventually colonize space, one thing we should ensure is that current animal exploitation practices do not spread off-planet with us. There should be no factory farming in space or on other planets, no animal experimentation, and robust animal protection laws for any nonhuman animals who do get brought into space. Nonhuman animals in space should potentially be banned altogether, unless there are compelling reasons for doing so that result in good lives for the animals involved.
(In real life, there wouldn’t be two shadow Earths hovering on the horizon like that. Although it does look pretty cool.)
A Future Focused on Well-Being For All
In general, I hope that we as humanity move in a direction that is more focused on the well-being of all: humans and nonhumans.
Ultimate success should not be measured solely by growth, or technological progress, or profits, or human well-being alone. Success should be measured by the well-being of ourselves and the other sentient beings who we share the planet with. Technology and other tools can help us get there; but ultimately, it is well-being of individuals that counts.
If we are able to point humanity in the direction of well-being for all—and this is not at all a sure thing—then we will have to make some large changes to how we currently operate. These changes will take time and span generations of humans, but we should not be complacent about making them; rather, we should act with as much urgency as we can muster.
But if we are successful—and I truly hope that we are—the future planet could be a much better place for all of its inhabitants.
…
All images in this post were created using DALL·E and ChatGPT4.
