> Hopeful only for those of us who are satisfied with a role of beloved pets, fed, housed, medicated, valued and entertained in ways that would be inaccessible to us if we were left alone.

I don't necessarily disagree with this framing, which is fairly common, but I'm also not sure I entirely agree with it. What would "not being a pet" look like, relative to that framing? It's not as if human(oid)s don't have freedom in The Culture.