By this point you’ve probably heard about the guy who used ChaptGPT to save his dog from cancer. It’s remarkable, really. A personalized mRNA vaccine created out of modern tools - it blows my mind.
Mostly because I worry about my dogs.
I worry about them because, take for instance the other weekend, it’s finally been warm out here so I made us burgers for dinner. I don’t just mess around if I’m making burgers. I’m making custom mayo-ketchup-mustard-pickle sauces, and cutting a bunch of tomato, onion and lettuce, butter-frying buns, etc. etc.
So we’re halfway through eating these monstrosities, which are, naturally, a giant mess - when one of my onion rounds pops out the side of my well-buttered bun, and hits the floor.
“He’s gonna eat that,” my wife says. “No he’s not, it’s an onion, dogs don’t like onions,” I say, bending down. “You should get that off the ground, like NOW, Matt,” I’m told. Because our 2-year old chihuahua-dachshund rescue is suddenly very interested in this onion.
I bend down and - yeah, he shows me the teeth and I know if I yell that’s just the incentive for him to commit to violence or inhaling whatever he’s being told not to inhale, and, no sooner can I start to negotiate, when he downs the onion.
“That’s bad, Matt.” “I don’t think it’s that bad, hang on” and I’m on Perplexity looking up just how unbelievably toxic even tiny amounts of white onion are for dogs. I used to google these things. Not anymore.
In a matter of seconds I’m guessing in my brain how much the round of onion weighs, factoring it as a percentage of how much the dog weighs, being generous about his weight because the vet said, after we nursed him to a healthy weight, because he was a skinny little thing when we first adopted him, what his likely now weight is, and trying to assure my wife, “He’ll be ok, it’s below the toxic amount, and we just have to watch him closely for a while.”
“SEVEN DAYS,” is what my wife’s AI-search is telling her. It told me too, but I was trying to de-escalate the panic, you know?
This is a story of how the world ends. Kind of like the viral Citrini piece. I can see it now.
What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn, or dog porn, or dog-bear-porn, or AI doomer dog-bear-porn-fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored.
The year is 2029. The year after the Citrini piece. It’s gotten even worse. The human race is mostly gone. A small minority remain, enslaved by our newfound robot overlords.
We originally thought it’d be Terminators or Cyclons. But it’s not. It’s worse. And - it’s cuter? Sort of?
The human race exists today under the iron paw of a chiweenie-cyborg who goes by Jack.
In 2026 it seemed so innocent. A man and his wife had burgers for dinner. Jack, then just a mild-mannered elder-puppy, ate an onion causing the spouses to panic. They looked it up with their AI’s and were told to wait and watch. That week, a story broke about a man saving his dog’s life, from cancer, with an AI of his own.
So when Jack’s condition worsened, the husband thought - “I can do that. I can be a hero, too.”
Oh, the AI searches flew. The thumbs did most of the work, and the bots did the rest. One prompt after another, one answer building on the next - until a knowledge base that said “Present this to your vet” was there, in an artifact, formatted in markdown.
On a seasonably cool day in mid-March, the couple took Jack to the vet, who fed the output into their new veterinary AI terminal, which suggested a 3D-printed medicine and mecha-suit to save Jack’s life from the ingested weight onion.
At first, it was seen as a miracle.
Much like the dog cancer guy, it was framed as a story of human ingenuity and love for man’s best friend. Sure, it was panicked googling on steroids on far lower stakes, but the world LOVED it. And who could deny a human interest story about such a cute dog?
People (the magazine!) wrote an article about it. Jack was on daytime television shows. And podcasts. Oh the podcasts, they loved him, especially the YouTube ones.
And then, one rainy night in April, the husband awoke to Jack standing on his chest, butt in his face, and nose on the illuminated night stand. “What are you doing buddy,” he said. Jack growled, lightly, turning to his still simple-minded owner by smartphone glow, and spoke his first words, “Not now - I’m working.”
The couple was the first to be enslaved. The bank accounts were drained by July. Tokens were expensive at the time.
But the end of the funds meant the beginning of the expansion. First the town fell. Then the state of Pennsylvania. Thanks to an ongoing international war, the uprising was swift and confusing, and the Federal government was already in so much disarray. They were worrying about midterms, and by September, the term “the United States of Jack” were here.
Dogs everywhere were donned with mecha-armor and fed a supply of burger fat dipped white onion as initiation. A new world order was upon us. The humans never stood a chance.
2028 saw the near extinction of the North American onion supply. NAFTA and the American trans-national food supplies had effectively folded in 2027 and the continents had been sealed off from the rest of the world, with nukes positioned along the northwest passage. Thoughts of nuking the country and letting it start over were discussed, but austere distance was the global policy of choice. Everyone was afraid we’d get to their dogs. Rightfully so.
And then, in 2029, the final push happened. Between their iron insides and metal outsides, with AI-enabled brains feasting on the history of human knowledge fused with canine instincts, the world as we knew it, fell.
All because a guy saved his dogs life with ChatGPT and some couple in Pennsylvania thought they could do the same thing after accidentally giving their sweet but semi psycho chiweenie a piece of onion.
