In the past, we’ve had issues with women suffrage, slavery, and sanitation, among many other things.
Today we have gun control, AI, intended/unintended false information, vaccines, etc. as consistently hot topics.
In a few decades’ time, what views do you have now that may spark major social debate in the future? What conservative and/or progressive stances do you take today that might be too far on either extreme in the far future?
I think owning animals as pets will be seen as barbaric and similar to 19th century slavery is seen to us today. We take a conscious being and force it to be our plaything against its will.
I don’t really care very much but I’m guessing where society is heading it will become an issue.
Of course privacy will be a big one. Very soon interrogation rooms will have advanced mind reading devices powered by AI. If a judge signs a warrant for your phone data, why can’t they sign one for your mental data?
We already have the mechanisms in place and the technology while at its fledgling stages shows that it is certainly possible. Right now they need to scan your brain for a while and feed lots of data to an AI model and its limited to specific applications. But conceivably we are not that far away from total mind-reading like we see in the second half of 1984.
Maybe I’m too prone to conspiracy beliefs but I think federal government likely already has this technology.
I don’t necessarily think your first point will happen, at least not anytime soon, but I do agree with it.
It’s so weird to me that we as humans have the ego to want to control another living thing. Control what they can and cannot do, make them live in a small place, and generally just strip them from their freedom they should have as a living thing, and still feel like we’re giving them a good life.
Also there are way too many shitty owners. I for real think there should be some sort of license/course people need to take before owning a pet. So many incidents that leave the pets or other humans hurt.
I don’t care because the guilt I have is less than the pleasure I get from my dog’s company. I love having dogs. I treat them well - feed them meat every day and they sleep on the bed with me. We go to parks, walks multiple times a day, etc.
So they are having good lives in that sense, but at the end of the day it’s a subservient role where they have zero decision or autonomy. Sure, I let them sleep where they want but it’s ultimately a meaningless decision. They can’t consent because they are not able to make conscious decisions like we can. They are eternal children.
So maybe I’m not just enlightened enough and we will be more enlightened in the future. Having said that, our society is exploitative in nature. Most people sell their labor on threat of homelessness and starvation. Just sort of an unfortunate reality of scarcity.
Same, I have a dog and I love him a lot. After owning this dog for a while and seeing how smart he is, I would feel guilty owning another pet in the future I think.
Also, a question that I’ve had for a while is, if they actually don’t have a conscious or if we just don’t know if they have a conscious since we can’t understand them. Recently there havebeen more and more studies that show that dogs are self aware. I think just the fact that they have different personalities and that they have favorite toys, foods, sides of the bed, etc. shows that they at are conscious enough to make decisions yk. How could we say that they’re smart enough to choose what to sleep, but not how to live?
With the amount of domestication and inbreeding we have done to dogs, i doubt they will survive if they are not pets. I see that as the most unfortunate part. I’m really interested in what the future in animal rights will look like, but tbh I’m not invested enough to participate lol