The really big issue staring us in the face though is that our treatment of animals is accelerating the pace of pandemics.
Every tightly confined animal farm in the world is another lab doing serial passage gain of function experiments with zero BSL protections by the lab workers.
That said, whether to spend your energy on global poverty or abolishing factory farming really comes down to how you highly you rank animal suffering.
Is a thousand chickens tortured from birth to slaughter, worse than someone dying from malaria? What about ten thousand?
It's not at all obvious to me how animal sentience compares to human sentience, but it's clear to me that we should at least give it some consideration.
Even when I give animals only a fraction of the concern I have for humans, it's clear to me that factory farming is an incredible source of unnecessary suffering.
I hope we can learn to be considerate of not only humans different from us but other species too.
Why is "artificial meat production" the norm in "the distant future"? Couldn't humans just as well re-organise their societies in small agrarian groups that produce their food without torturing animals?