J.K. Rowling returns human rights award amid criticism from organization

[hazard]

Actually I wasn't being entirely sarcastic.  Playing a bit of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Brian Reynolds spends an awful lot of time trying to make you consider Chairman Yang's position.  He comes from a collectivist and authoritarian background, sure.  But there's a strong transhumanist element as well.  It's not eugenics per se, it's the idea is not to create better humans but to create something else entirely.  There were lots of great techs in that game like Mind-Machine Interface that suggest other ways you could do it.

The Human Hive is a horror, if an understandable one. It's absolutely great when you are a talent, but when you are just one of its thousands of drones? Your entire existence is engineered to be the best slave you can be. Yang's the fellow who came up with the Genejack concept after all...

(Also, you have good taste in games.)

Humans have flaws.  We have this dopamine reward loop thing where novelty is rewarded, this is ruthlessly exploited by Facebook and Twitter and Netflix.  Driving engagement is another word for hacking human weaknesses.  And it's not that we need to be more mindful or whatever -- these are designed to exploit flaws in a system designed for hunter-gatherers.  And, in general, we can't have nice things because some people choose to cheat.  Cheat to get more property, and thus be more successful.  Cheat to oppress and control others.  Cheat directly in reproduction through rape.

Those are not flaws and weaknesses Labster. Calling those flaws is like saying that the lock on your front door has a flaw. That being that there are keys that open it. You address an issue like that by restricting access to the keys, not by nailing the door shut.

As for those things you call cheats, those are not flaws of human nature, those are flaws of society in handling itself.

I specifically did mean eusocial in the biological sense, because reproductive suitability is a proxy for how much a species get along in general.

I do not agree that eusociality is a good indicator for reproductive suitability. Nor do I agree that reproductive suitability is a good proxy for how much a species gets along between its members in general.

But also consider what a transhuman future could look like.  Maybe we push a button, a man gets hit with a V5 ray, and a sexy woman appears in their place.  Or maybe we could create full-body cyborgs that could let you switch apparent bodies.  Maybe people could become furries, whatever.  And maybe education becomes an entirely different thing if we're able to create an internet interface in the brain.  Do we even need to know most things when we can just look them up at any time with a thought?  Some of these things will happen, and humans themselves will change.

I hear a lot of maybes and a distinct lack of concrete concerns. Transhumanism has the same problem as fusion power.

We'll have it. 50 years in the future. Just like we said for the last however many decades since we came up with the notion. We'll address it when it starts to become relevant, but right now? The closest we are getting is partial conversion cyborgs, and those are just flat out too expensive, limited and risky for anything other than assisting the permanently disabled.

So yes, society needs to change to accommodate human nature.  But human nature will also be changed in the next century.  Human nature was changed in the last century, with a massive experiment we did called leaded gasoline; it turns out it increased violence in that period especially in the most polluted areas, but not enough to change the overall trend of society's downward pressure on violence.

Human nature did not change substantially with leaded gasoline. It certainly expressed itself more violently, but it did not exactly change.

One female and many males. What makes you think I get a choice? It's her body.

It's your choice to pursue her or another. I mean, at birth the ratio of males to females for humanity is about 109 to 100. At age 18 it's about 100 to 100. And after that women outnumber the men in every age bracket, even in risk averse, low violence societies. If humanity is prone to eusocial behaviours it's more likely to manifest as multiple women contributing to the raising of the children of a single male-female breeding pair than multiple men doing the same.

Yet even that is not true; in societies where multiple women are involved with a single male, there's a few, it's very common for all the women to bear children and for the children to be raised communally to one extent or another. As a species humanity tends greatly towards serial polygyny, forming more or less stable family units centered around a single male, and multiple such family units forming a tribe.