I've been thinking about this in vague terms for a while (and have used the analogy a few times in conversations), but it was an entirely different experience to read it an properly written way, with many details I hadn't considered.
Best intuition-pumping exercise I've seen in a while!
Executive summary: The author runs a speculative “UK in 1800” thought experiment to highlight how hard it would have been to predict later major sources and scales of animal suffering (e.g., factory farming, mass animal experimentation), and uses that to argue that our own 2026 forecasts about the AI-driven future are likely to miss big, weird shifts—especially if technological progress outpaces moral progress.
Key points:
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Great post! It really made me dive into the perspective of that era and empathize with how such a future was quite inscrutable from their point of view at the time.
Reflecting on it, at least for known historical cases, it seems that moral catastrophes like these happen at the intersection of three concomitant elements: the needs/interests of the dominant group (cheap meat, safe drugs, scientific progress), the advent of new techniques/technologies to satisfy those needs (factory farming, animal testing), and a specific moral framework (the common view that animal suffering is not morally salient).
This strikes me as potentially interesting because, while the first two factors might be particularly hard to predict or act upon a priori, the third could perhaps offer a more stable and tractable lever. Improving our ethical framework could be seen as a default, 'evergreen' strategy to mitigate the risk of future catastrophes from a long-term perspective. By mainstreaming the idea that avoiding the suffering of any sentient being is of great moral importance, we might build a general defense against new forms of moral catastrophes.
Of course, this wouldn't exclude other approaches; rather, they could work in parallel. While moral progress might serve as the long-term foundation, we could then evaluate on a case-by-case basis whether technological fixes or other targeted interventions would be more effective for specific risks as they emerge. As you mentioned, staying alert to how new needs and technologies evolve remains crucial.
I am not a historian! Fact check me please, dear God!
We are at the beginning of another industrial revolution. The first was the automation of muscle, the current one is the automation of mind.
To get into the right frame of mind, I want to step back and imagine:
We are living in the UK[1], the year is 1800, and we are trying to end animal suffering. We know nothing about how the tech is about to develop, nor how the economy or politics is about to be transformed, but there are faint clues.
Steam engines have started powering textile factories and milling grain, but no trains yet, no electricity. There are almost a billion people in the world, and a similar number of livestock living almost entirely on small farms. The first factory farms won't go up for almost 150 years.
Let's go back in time.
All animals kept for food are living on small farms. The conditions are not great: they have little protection from the cold, no veterinary care, and they are slaughtered crudely[2] and in public. However, compared to life on a factory farm, things look pretty idyllic.
Selective breeding is well underway. In the last hundred years, the weight of individual cattle/sheep have roughly doubled. No one has a clue about genetics.[3]
At this point in the UK, per capita meat consumption is probably declining. Estimates vary, but the consumption of meat seems to have peaked around 1750. The human population is growing fast[4] and moving to cities, and the working class subsist primarily on cheap bread.
Roughly half of all livestock in the UK are sheep, kept primarily for their wool, with meat as a secondary byproduct. Simultaneously, cotton is rapidly overtaking wool as the primary fiber used in clothing, putting a serious strain on the industry.[5]
Many of the core technologies that will later enable factory farms, like antibiotics or vitamins, haven't been developed or even remotely imagined.[6]
The economy depends heavily on horses and oxen[7]. They work on farms, transporting goods/people, they fight in war, and they work in mines hauling coal and ore[8]. They make up something like 5-10% of livestock.[9]
Mechanization might imply that these animals are going to become increasingly obsolete, but anyone thinking this in 1800 would be dead wrong. The horse population is about to explode[10]. Steam power will massively increase demand for horses in coal mines and transportation, and their population won't start declining until the 1910s.[11]
Blood sports like cockfighting or rat-baiting are extremely mainstream. Like going to the pub, this is casual entertainment on a weekly basis, and very hard to ignore. Over the next fifty years there will be a major push to ban these activities, motivated primarily by concerns about the moral corruption of working class people.[12]
Cockfighting might be as high as 1% of all animals killed[13], with similar numbers for rat-baiting, though rats were being constantly exterminated as pests at much higher numbers.[14]
Ending blood sports is the low hanging fruit of this time, though arguing for the welfare of rats, a serious human health hazard, is completely incomprehensible to anyone who bothers to listen.
You have probably never even heard of animal testing. It does technically happen, but it's extremely rare. There are no research universities and no pharmaceutical industry.
Over the next few decades you'll start to hear about how people in France and Germany have started dissecting animals while they're still alive, and almost everyone you know is appalled to hear this.[15] In 1824, a visiting French physiologist will perform a public demonstration, cutting open a living dog to a London audience. This causes widespread outrage.
Animal testing will become more common over the course of the 19th century, but it won't really take off until the 20th[16], exploding to the hundreds of millions of animals experimented on and killed today.
Far away, in Japan, they are about to perform the world's first surgery with general anesthesia (1804). It'll be about 50 years before this gets to the UK. Laws will emerge mandating that animals be anesthetized, but these will be poorly enforced, and like today, only apply to surgeries on animals (force feedings, toxic exposure, disease don't count).
Coastal communities across the country all fish, sending out small sailing boats. There are no trains or refrigeration, so without preserving the fish by salting/smoking, they can't be transported inland.
There is a small-scale (sail powered) bottom trawling operation in Brixham, a small coastal town, and the practice is starting to get more popular. There aren't fish farms exactly, though fish ponds keep some freshwater fish for elites.
Railways will increase demand, and steam powered trawlers will increase supply, but there is a very long way to go before reaching the staggering modern scale of trillions of wild-caught fish, or the hundreds of billions of farmed fish globally.[17]
Whaling is also a growing industry, deeply tied to the industrial revolution. Whale oil is used extensively for lighting, industrial lubrication, as well as other products like soap. Demand is rising fast.[18]
Like today, wild animals make up the vast majority of individuals. England has already been largely deforested by this point, but they are an outlier globally.
It's hard to imagine successfully intervening in nature today, but in 1800 this is beyond absurd. No gene-drives, no examples of past interventions to learn from. Darwin hasn't even been born yet.
Some philosophers, going back to the 1600s, suggest that animals have no inner lives, though this is not universally held (Bentham's famous "can they suffer" line was published 11 years ago).
Ordinary people all basically agree that animals can suffer, but they mostly don't believe that suffering is morally important. The dominant moral frameworks center around human virtue, and people are much more concerned with "wanton cruelty" on the side of the perpetrator, than the experience of the victim.[19]
Animals are extremely visible and present in people's lives (unlike today), but caring overly about them is considered irrational, sentimental, and effeminate.[20]
Futurism is basically non-existent, and the first popular sci-fi story (Frankenstein) won't be published until 1818. Intellectuals know about accumulating technological progress, but people don't expect the future to be radically different.
The first UK census (of humans) will take place next year. The Board of Agriculture was established just a few years ago, and they have started commissioning some county-level agricultural surveys. Import/export data is better, since it's taxed by the government, and if you are wealthy and well-connected you can probably get access to this data and try to extrapolate.[21]
Wild animal population surveys are totally unheard of, though people are discovering and documenting new species.
You know basically nothing about the rest of the world, or how many animals are living there. The idea that someone could just look up how many chickens are being killed in China is beyond sci-fi.
Democracy is very rare, and the UK is one of the most democratic places in the world (something like 2-3% of the population can vote). The United States was extremely radical for allowing most adult white men to vote, but as a fraction of the total population this was probably still in the single digits. Autocracy is, and has always been, the norm in the world.[22]
The ideas of universal suffrage and women's rights are new, and very radical, but they are circulating. There is no obvious trend toward a more democratic society so far, as the franchise has been basically frozen for about 400 years. However, huge political changes are on the horizon (1832).
There are basically no NGOs or organized advocacy. The first ever animal welfare organization, the SPCA (later RSPCA), won't be founded for another 24 years, and even then it will struggle to get real recognition for decades. The first animal welfare bill was just introduced in parliament this year (it failed). The first successful animal welfare legislation is 22 years out.[23]
The British empire is expanding. Simultaneously, slavery abolitionists (some of them the same people who end up founding the SPCA) proposed bills to end the slave trade about a decade ago, though most failed.[24]
The UK is a global superpower, and policy decisions made in London are projected all throughout the world. When the slave trade finally gets abolished in 1807, it's the British navy that enforces this, not just on the empire, but on other nations as well, and at great expense. The same might be true for animals: regulations, farming practices, and trade policies set in London could shape how animal agriculture develops across the world for centuries.
This kind of top-down projection of moral reform through the world is unprecedented, but so are the new bottom-up tactics used by the abolitionist movement, like grass roots organizing, petitions, and boycotts.[25] As an animal welfare advocate, you are definitely paying close attention to all of these changes.
Looking forward from our position in 1800, trying to predict the future... What could we have guessed? What would we have gotten wrong? What might this imply about our epistemic position today?
Factory farms: The scale of animal agriculture today would have completely shocked anyone. The mechanisms that enable this scale are unknown unknowns.[26]
Obsolescence: A radical futurist might have imagined that work animals like horses would become obsolete, and they would have been right, but the trajectory of boom and bust would probably have surprised them.[27]
Entertainment: At this point, no one needs to hunt anymore, but the rich still do it for fun. The end of blood sports[28] like cockfighting doesn't happen because of technological progress, but because of moral progress.
These are some very amateur and speculative thoughts, but hopefully they motivate the kind of gap that exists between us now, and someone attempting to achieve similar goals back in 1800.
Back to 2026...
What does it all mean?
I don't think it's super helpful to take an entirely outside-view perspective here, and draw vague conclusions like, "If they couldn't have predicted x in 1800, why should we expect to predict y?".
Rather, I think it should motivate, at least on an emotional/gut level, just how different and counterintuitive the future is likely to be. The biggest sources of suffering may come from unexpected places, and the scale we're talking about could be radically different. But at the same time, some facts won't change, or at least, not that much.
I think it's also worth paying attention to timelines here. The industrial revolution happened over the course of centuries, and the AI revolution seems to be happening a lot faster than that. What happens, for example, if technological progress outpaces moral progress?
More than anything, for me, this thought exercise motivates how important it is to stay on our toes, and pay careful attention to the changes already happening. The future's going to get real weird, but with shorter timelines than back in 1800, we're going to be able to see and respond to a lot of radical things first hand.
The industrial revolution happened first in the UK, decades before the rest of the world. For this reason I'll be focusing primarily on the UK in the late 1700s, early 1800s.
Stunning, for example, wasn't required in the UK until 1933.
Mendel's experiments won't happen until 1866, and still his results will be ignored for decades.
It's not clear, at this point, that the human population will ever stabilize or decline. Thomas Malthus published his essay about human overpopulation just two years ago.
The cotton gin was invented in 1793, and this massively increased the supply of cotton, especially from slave labor in the US South.
We got the beginnings of germ theory in the 1860s, and the first antibiotic wasn't until 1928. MAYBE someone could have imagined vitamins, since people had connected scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) to citrus back in the 1740s, but the first vitamin won't be isolated until 1913.
An ox is a castrated male cow (bull), trained to pull/carry heavy loads. This is also where the distinction between work animal and food animal gets fuzzy, since oxen were also slaughtered and eaten after years of work.
"Pit ponies" were kept underground for months or years at a time without seeing the surface.
Estimates I could find from this time were really terrible, please correct me.
The US data on this is better: 4 million horses/mules in 1840, up to 27 million by 1910, collapsing back down to 3 million by 1960. The UK went through a similar boom and bust pattern, though absolute numbers were smaller (peak 3 million).
Likewise, their use in war will also increase dramatically, with the UK sending something like a million horses to their death in WWI.
Hunting, an upper-class sport, will remain protected, though the absolute numbers of animals killed is much smaller.
Getting good numbers on this is super hard, so this is a rough guess. Almost every town/village was doing this across the country. Apparently the Earl of Derby bred 3000 fighting cocks per year.
Rats: is it worse today, or in the 1800s? Hard to say. Rat to human ratio was probably much higher, given the terrible sanitation, but then again there are more humans now. We also have much more sophisticated poison now, which cause rats to bleed out internally over the course of days, probably much worse than being caught by dogs, as was most common at the time.
As with blood sports, people were concerned with the moral character of the people performing vivisections, worrying that it would "harden the heart" and make doctors unfit to treat (human) patients.
Things really get going with the emergence of the pharmaceutical industry, and the legal mandates to test on animals following various disasters involving untested drugs.
Shrimp are all wild-caught. Very small scale. The modern scale of aquaculture is actually very recent, taking off over the last 50 years.
Whaling doesn't really explode until the middle of the 20th century.
Also, while a few people are vegetarian, this is quite rare (the word won't be coined for another 50 years). The word "vegan" won't appear for another 150 years.
A bit like today!
Data I found about the 18th/19th century was from modern academics doing exactly this.
Of course, prior to states, power was much more distributed/egalitarian. Very few people in 1800 (or today) would have seen this as desirable.
Technically, the Massachusetts legal code included provisions against animal cruelty all the way back in 1641. If you were well-read in 1800, you might have heard of it.
The abolition movement is actually in a lull at this point. Most bills have failed. Thomas Clarkson, the lead campaigner, retired in 1794 for health reasons. The UK is at war with France, and things won't pick up again until 1804.
In 1800, we'd have remembered a ton of grass roots activism about ten years ago, but at this point fears of radicalism have crushed momentum, following the revolutions in France (1789) and Haiti (1791). France and Britain have been at war since 1793.
Meat is still a luxury product, and ideas like Malthusianism could have implied either extremely high demand (due to population growth), or virtually nonexistent demand (universal poverty). Extrapolating from trend-lines at this time would have likely led us astray.
We should probably be uncertain about exactly how things like meat or animal testing become obsolete. While AI might ultimately make them obsolete in the long term, strange and surprising things could happen in the medium term.
To be clear, this hasn't actually ended. It's still legal in many parts of the world, and also happens underground.
This is beautiful, thank you! This has definitely planted some seeds in my mind. Perhaps the most interesting points to me have been the prevalence of cockfighting and the dominance of ethics centered around virtues