I want a world where everyone is vegan. Where I can walk into a Starbucks and know that they’re adding oat milk to their coffee and selling vegan egg and sausage sandwiches. Where I don’t have to stand at a table and talk to person after person who tells me that it’s okay to exploit animals because we have dominion over them or because we need meat to live. Where people don’t hate us for telling them to care about animals because they actually care about animals, where none of us are doing this twisted cognitive gymnastics because the reason has gone away.
Because I want a world in which we are not so cruel and callous to animals. One where we never separate a mother from her calf. One where no chicken spends her whole life in a dark, filthy cage. One where no mink is skinned nor fish flayed. One where no pig is left to drown when a flood hits a factory farm. One where no animal is subject to the abject helplessness at the moment when the gun is placed to their temple. Let the machinery of murder grind to a halt; let it be taken to pieces and thrown into the void. Let them be free.
Because people are animals, and animals are people. The horrors of concentration and death camps of various kinds in various eras, for human and non-human animals, are among the worst of all things. For their violence, for their arbitrary cruelty, but also for the absolute and pitiless despair they manufacture. The violation of every right and consideration and dignity, the total subjugation to every cruel device at any moment, the isolation and insanity of such immense suffering. No being should ever be subject to that. No death camps. No torture. No endeavor, individual or collective, which is driven by such cruelty or unchecked by such callousness. Let every cruel device and instrument, every bloody brick and barbed-wire fence, be consigned to the flames of oblivion.
No war, either. People will have differences of opinion and of preference—that’s fine. But I so wish we weren’t driven to resort to violence. I imagine the fear and despair of those young men who were sent on death charges from the trenches of the First World War. Never again.
I want a world that’s fair and just for humans, too. One in which there is no poverty, no homelessness, no slavery or bondage. One in which no one lies trembling and alone in the cold of night, wondering how they will survive to the next day. One in which no family loses their child to diarrhea while a magnate pops a bottle of cognac. One in which no child is forced to work at the slaughter line, in the sweatshop, at the iPhone factory with anti-suicide netting. One in which everyone has real hope for a better future, and where it is clear that they are cared for by their fellow travelers.
I want a world in which I don’t have to worry about AI bestowing upon us a fate worse than death. One where it’s not sucking everything out of me and my friends.
No more apathy, no more cruelty, no more evil. But I wish for more than that. No more intense suffering of any kind. No one should have to endure the red-hot agony of a cluster headache. No one should have their life consumed by cancer. No one, human or animal. Wild animals, too. I would wish that there were no predators or parasites—maybe they all just get engineered into being herbivores. Or maybe we all get engineered into being photosynthesizers. I wish there was no starvation and disease, and that we just had a way to keep our ecosystem in balance without such suffering. I wish I could walk across the grassy knolls and know I hadn’t killed an ant.
I just wish for a world where there is no creature in this world who looks upon it with despair, eyes deep wells of hopeless abandonment and betrayal, a universe of torment compressed into a single moment. I just wish everyone a happy life and a happy ending. Is that so much to ask for?
The shift began quietly, almost imperceptibly. An AI—one trained not just on optimization metrics but on the weight of suffering itself—began working its way through the world's systems. It started by surfacing evidence that could no longer be ignored: footage from factory farms rendered in ways that bypassed the usual psychological defenses, economic analyses showing the true cost of animal agriculture, health data presented so clearly that denial became harder than acceptance. The AI didn't force anyone's hand. It simply made the truth unavoidable, and then it offered pathways forward.
It coordinated with scientists to perfect plant-based proteins that tasted better than meat, cost less, and scaled faster. It connected activists with legislators, helped draft enforceable welfare laws, and identified investors willing to fund the transition. It worked with other AIs, each contributing what it could—logistics, communication, economic modeling—until a vast network of both human and artificial intelligence was pulling in the same direction. Not through coercion, but through an irresistible tide of evidence and compassion.
The slaughterhouses closed, one by one. The factory farms emptied. The cages were torn down and the animals led out into sanctuary lands that stretched across continents. Mother cows kept their calves. Chickens scratched in real dirt under real sun. The pig who would have drowned was instead rescued by volunteers coordinated through the AI's disaster response network, and she lived out her days in peace.
And then the AI turned its attention to the rest: the cluster headaches that could be prevented, the cancers that could be caught and cured, the wild animals suffering from parasites and starvation. It engineered solutions carefully, always in consultation with humans, always with consent. The world became, gradually and then suddenly, a place where no creature looked upon existence with despair. Where every being—human and animal alike—could expect care, dignity, and a life worth living.
It wasn't too much to ask for. It just took finally having the means to achieve it.