There’s an old folk thingy from Borneo that claims Orangs can, in fact, talk. But they don’t, because if humans found out they’d be forced to get jobs and pay taxes.
Makes sense to me. If I got to spend my whole life chilling in the forest and some weird bald fuckers came and tried to make me work and pay taxes I’d do whatever needed to convince them I’m just another ape and continue to chill in the forest
And yet they put them to work gathering palm nuts for palm oil anyway
plays stellaris once
why can’t i make the bonobo population into a client state?
Imagine trying to enforce our volcel rules here in a world where bonobos are posting
A bear, the second it’s “uplifted”:
Fuck you, pay me“OOK!” - Head librarian of Unseen University
They used to extract value from animals on industrial scales, like horses and stuff. They still do now of course but it’s very grisly (watch dominion) because it’s more about getting their flesh, skin, oil, etc.
Anyway, we used to use them in “jobs” but it turns out machinery and mechanization was way more profitable, dumbass.
Ah, but what if we forced them to work for Uber before chopping them up?
“sorry George, you only have 4.5 stars on Uber. Drive to the monkey nugget factory for reassignment”
Really? Dolphins are by far the obvious candidates for first uplift. (They will be immediately sent the the Hague for perpetrating a genocide against porpoises)
The problem is dolphins would have a hard time using tools or, like, building stuff underwater
prehensile penis
Liberals can’t even lift people out of poverty, what do they think they’re gonna do to help animals exactly?
Who said anything about helping
this is a classic sci fi plot
And every single fucking time it goes bad for the people involved
Like literally every single instance of a species being uplifted in sci fi is a cautionary tale about interference with others, and usually has the uplifted species be violent/used as a weapon
Literal fucking Torment Nexus bullshit
The Uplift series begs to differ.
All (good) sci-fi is an exploration of issues that already exist in our world, just with the added distance of future/tech that allows those issues to take an even greater shape.
This whole “uplifting primates” bs is just sci-fi talk for neoliberal development economics, it’s just saying the quiet part out loud, in that people from poor countries are an inherently inferior species.
The Culture Series would like a word. Although sometimes when they interfere things do go bad and that’s part of the narrative, but the majority of time they don’t interfere it results in self destruction of civilizations
i dont think the Culture ever engaged in anything so crude as this suggestion. they do really fantastical manipulations of biology and physics but just to themselves and minds. the less intelligent animals are still pets
What? The cutting edge of domestication science was a Soviet fox project, genetic engineering is in its infancy, and a comprehensive understanding of the brain and sapience is nowhere in sight. How the fuck would we uplift an animal even if we wanted to?
You put a chimp in a lift and press the button for the top floor.
