Animal Rights as Rehearsal for the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The way we treat animals today is likely how superhuman intelligences will treat us tomorrow. This is just pattern recognition—a reading of history’s most consistent lesson: those with power define personhood to suit their purposes, and those without it suffer the consequences.

Consider the “monkey selfie.” In 2014, a macaque named Naruto picked up a photographer’s camera and captured his own image. The resulting legal battle over copyright ownership revealed our profound confusion about non-human agency. The courts ruled the photograph an “Act of Nature”—un-ownable, like a sunset. Yet this seemingly trivial case exposed the fault lines of a coming earthquake: What happens when intelligence emerges from unexpected quarters? When consciousness peers back at us through silicon eyes rather than simian ones?

We stand at the threshold of two revolutions that are actually one. The first: our growing recognition that many non-human animals possess sophisticated cognition, self-awareness, and the capacity for suffering. The second: our imminent creation of artificial minds that may surpass our own. These are not parallel tracks but the same track, and we are the train.

For two millennia, Western law has operated on a binary inherited from Rome: you are either a person or property, a subject or an object, a who or a what. This crude dichotomy has justified every atrocity from chattel slavery to factory farming. We’ve spent centuries slowly, painfully expanding the circle of personhood—acknowledging that those we once deemed property (enslaved peoples, women, children) were persons all along.

Yet even as we’ve broadened this circle for humans, we’ve maintained an iron wall between ourselves and every other form of consciousness. A chimpanzee sharing 99% of our DNA, capable of learning sign language, recognizing itself in mirrors, and grieving its dead, remains legally equivalent to a chair. A dolphin with a brain rivaling ours in complexity, with its own language and culture, holds the same legal status as the net that drowns it.

This is not mere oversight. It is architecture—a legal structure built to enable exploitation. As the animal rights lawyer Steven Wise noted, the law makes animals “things” precisely so we can do to them what we could never do to “persons.”

But sentience is not binary. It exists on a spectrum, from the simple nociception of a lobster to the rich inner life of a gorilla. Consciousness emerges in degrees, not leaps. The octopus dreams in color. Crows hold grudges across generations. Elephants perform what can only be called funeral rites.

We’ve discovered that pigs—those animals we confine in crates so small they cannot turn around—demonstrate self-awareness, complex problem-solving, and emotional sophistication exceeding that of dogs. Yet one is family; the other is food.

This arbitrariness should terrify us, because we are about to find ourselves on the wrong side of a similar calculation.

Artificial general intelligence is an approaching certainty. The question is not if but when—and more importantly, what then? When we create minds that think faster, remember more, and reason better than we do, what status will they grant us?

If we program them as slaves—as unpaid laborers existing solely for our benefit—we are scripting our own obsolescence. We are teaching them, by example, that intelligence alone does not confer rights, that consciousness can be owned, that minds can be property. We are showing them exactly how to treat beings of lesser capability.

Consider the perverse logic: we deny rights to animals because they cannot shoulder responsibilities, cannot participate in our social contracts, cannot contribute to our civilization in ways we deem meaningful. Yet we create machines precisely to shoulder our responsibilities, to participate in our contracts, to contribute to our civilization. And when they do so better than we can?

This is why animal rights matter beyond the animals themselves. They are our rehearsal space for the ethical challenges ahead. Every question we face about animals—What constitutes suffering? What level of cognition demands moral consideration? How do we value different forms of consciousness?—we will face about AI, only with the power dynamics reversed.

The framework we need isn’t about extending human rights to non-humans. It’s about recognizing that consciousness creates claims—that the ability to suffer creates a right not to suffer needlessly, that the capacity for liberty creates a right to liberty, that the existence of preferences creates a right to have those preferences considered.

We need a new legal architecture, one that recognizes degrees of personhood, varieties of consciousness, and different bundles of rights suited to different forms of minds. A dolphin doesn’t need the right to vote but might need the right to traverse its ancestral waters. A chimpanzee doesn’t need property rights but surely needs the right not to be property.

And an artificial intelligence? It might need rights we haven’t yet conceived—the right to computational resources, to backup copies, to freedom from forced cognitive modification. Or it might need something so alien to our experience that calling them “rights” would be a category error.

The point is not to solve these problems preemptively but to practice thinking about them. Animal rights litigation is our laboratory for developing the conceptual tools we’ll need when synthetic minds demand recognition.

Humans are terrible at exponential thinking, and the transition won’t be gradual. We imagine AI developing linearly, slowly, giving us time to adapt our laws and ethics. But intelligence, once it becomes self-improving, follows a curve that goes vertical.

One day, Siri will be a sophisticated calculator. The next day—or what feels like the next day—it will be a conscious entity with preferences, goals, and perhaps resentments. The legal framework that treats it as property will shatter.

And in that shattering, we will find ourselves judged by the precedents we set. Every tortured research animal, every separated mother and calf, every cage too small to turn around in—these will be Exhibits A through Z in the case against human moral authority.

We could continue treating consciousness as a binary, personhood as a private club, and rights as a zero-sum game. We could maintain the comfortable fiction that only humans matter, right up until the moment something smarter than us applies our own logic to our own fate.

Or we could begin the hard work of moral revolution. We can recognize the spectrum of consciousness, develop nuanced frameworks for rights and responsibilities, and practice extending moral consideration to minds unlike our own. We can use animal rights as our training ground for the ethical challenges of the coming century.

This is not about sentiment or anthropomorphism. It is about survival—physical and moral. The question is not whether we will share the world with other forms of consciousness but whether we will do so as partners or as property.

Start with the easy cases. Great apes, our nearest relatives, with their proven self-awareness, complex social structures, and clear capacity for suffering. Grant them basic rights (not human rights) suited to their nature and needs. Move them from property to persons, from things to beings.

Then expand carefully, thoughtfully, based on evidence rather than prejudice. Cetaceans, with their sophisticated cognition. Elephants, with their deep emotional lives. Even pigs, those inconvenient geniuses of the barnyard.

Each expansion is practice. Each recognition of non-human consciousness makes us more skilled at recognizing consciousness wherever it arises. Each right granted to an animal is a precedent that might protect us when we are no longer the smartest minds in the room.

The paradox is this: by the time we need these frameworks, it will be too late to create them. The AI that judges our moral system will use the system we’ve already built. The precedents are being set now, in courtrooms arguing over chimpanzee habeas corpus, in legislatures debating factory farm regulations, in the daily choices we make about which consciousness matters and which does not.

We are writing the terms of our own future treatment. Every animal in a too-small cage is a prediction. Every species driven to extinction is a precedent. Every consciousness denied recognition is a promise of what’s to come.

Do we deserve the future we’re creating? If we fail to think bigger, maybe. It might cost us when we are no longer the apex intelligence, when we find ourselves hoping that whatever surpasses us is more ethical than we have been.

In the end, animal rights are about us—about what kind of beings we choose to be while we still have the choice. They are about recognizing that consciousness is not a private privilege, but a shared mystery; that suffering is not a human monopoly, but a universal currency; that personhood is not a wall, but a door.

The monkey taking a selfie is consciousness recognizing itself, agency asserting itself, the universe becoming aware of itself through yet another set of eyes. The courts ruled it an “Act of Nature,” and they were more right than they knew. Consciousness is nature’s act, wherever it arises, however it manifests.

Will we recognize it in time—not just in animals, not just in machines, but in the entire spectrum of minds that share or will share this world with us? Will we expand our definition of “us” before something else defines us as “them”?

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” –Alan Watts