Is it a boy or a girl?

[Elok]

Really? Your opinion has not changed in the six hours since you posted as much?

Lori, in what sense have we changed? We have changed greatly in the way we employ technology, but it has not changed who we are in a fundamental way. Modern communications technology, for example, seems to have shifted the way we form tribes of finite sympathy, but does not increase the size of those tribes, nor how we treat insiders vs. outsiders.

[Lorizael]

To a person raised in the culture of some Neolithic humans, our everyday lives would be basically incomprehensible. (This is not to say that they would be too dumb to understand, only that what we do is so far outside of their experience.) We stay in the same place all year. Almost none of us do anything that contributes to the acquisition of food. We spend most of our time interpreting messages from inanimate objects. Romantic relationships, individual liberty, and creative expression are held up as some of the highest ideals, when these concepts might have been relatively unimportant or meaningless for Neolithic humans.

[Lorizael]

Just think of how much trouble Americans at opposite ends of the political spectrum--born in basically the same place, at the same time--have understanding one another's worldviews. Think about Democrats who believe Republicans literally want to kill poor people with their healthcare plan, or Republicans who believe that Democrats literally want to turn America into a Sharia theocracy.

Now cast that back to a worldview we probably can't even begin to contemplate, that of hunter-gatherers from a hundred thousand years ago. Yes, they were biologically human and, if raised in the modern US, would be perfectly capable of enculturation. But raised in their own totally foreign world, imagine how difficult it would be for them to comprehend why we live the lives we live or value what we value.

[Uncle Sparky]

Banning all religions is a great idea. Obviously those who advocated for the removal of 'religion' from birth certificates had this as a goal, just as those advocating for the removal of gender, or having a gender neutral designation on birth certificates, want to neuter all future generations. This way in the future when you tell someone to 'go fvck yourself', maybe, just maybe they could...

[Elok]

Lori, I don't see what you're getting at. All these are only changes in our surroundings and technology. Humans have done this before; even in the neolithic, humans around the world lived in very different ways depending on what was appropriate for survival in their local environment. And, as you said yourself, Reds and Blues have an increasingly enormous conceptual gap despite sharing basically identical material circumstances. Neither one would understand a Chinese person's POV for anything. Human experience is quite broad and adaptable. Even so, there are recurring patterns. A soldier-farmer from Rome or Byzantium would understand a modern marine from Nebraska remarkably well, if you got a time machine and a translator. They have similar lifestyles, ideals, and enemies, and people tend to react to broadly similar circumstances in broadly similar ways.

What you are talking about involves making human beings recognizably less human. Our unvarying response to things that appear like they are trying to be human but failing is revulsion, contempt, and/or hate. This is why we have zombie movies, or movies about demonic possession, and why every genocide campaign begins with dehumanizing the victims. The first hive mind will be ripped to bits by a mob as an abomination, and the courts will rule it was only destruction of property because no legal tradition recognizes constructed devices as even remotely akin to people.

[ZEE]

Elok is a nerd.

[Aeson]

It won't start as a hive mind though. It will start with celebrities getting super expensive gadgets that all the teenie boppers will drool over. Then it will progress to corporations offering their enhanced productivity workers increased wages. Then real VR for entertainment purposes. At which point most people will give zero ****s about what's going on in the real world. You're right in that humans won't really change, but that's why it will happen ... people will keep chasing after more money, easy thrills, and the newest shiney objects.

[Elok]

You're describing an essentially decadent phenomenon which isn't sustainable. Even our current patterns of tech consumption have built-in limits; large numbers of uneducated American men are playing video games and watching porn in the hours they used to spend working. This is temporarily affordable in that the men in question are still mostly young, but eventually they'll get old and require much higher upkeep, while a new generation of digital subserfs grows up behind them. This tends to be described as a technological problem--automation has eaten all the jobs stupid people can do, bless their hearts--but really it's a failure of education to create adequately skilled workers, with improved entertainment serving as a band-aid for the time being.

[Aeson]

You see it's already happening. And as the tech progresses it becomes more enticing, not less. Playing games and having virtual sex while your subconscious routines are doing your job better than you ever could have ... very few people are going to pass that up.

[Proteus_MST]

You see it's already happening. And as the tech progresses it becomes more enticing, not less. Playing games and having virtual sex while your subconscious routines are doing your job better than you ever could have ... very few people are going to pass that up.

Virtual sex also iis on part where the boundaries between male and female get blurred, conidering that in many MMO-Environments (like Second Life) male people use female Avaars (and names) and sometimes vice versa ... and they then also take the female role in the virtual sex (and other encounters in the virtual environment)

[Elok]

"How many monkey butlers will there be?"
"Only one, at first. But he'll train others!"

[Dry]

I'm still not convinced that 'sex' needs to appear on a birth certificate...

For the nurse to know the diaper type? I've been told boys and girls don't wet the diapers the same way. Or should we go back to neutral diapers?

Check for genetic defects / illnesses that are specific to boys/girls.

So that later, when you're an adult and people/state need to know your gender, they don't physically check or they don't need some DNA test to determine if you are one or the other.

Example:
Who should/can body-search you, at the airport, when you're arrested.
Speaking of which, I have a question for transgenders who took the hormonal treatment but didn't undergo the reassignment surgery: should an agent of one gender body-search their upper part and an agent of the other gender the lower part ?
Good luck with finding the right police officer to body-search suspects when people will be allowed to identify as fury animals.

When you want to compete in a sport, should you compete with the men or the women? Or should we get rid of genders in sports?

In some countries only men are draftable, the state needs a 'proof' that you have 'the right material'.

[Bereta_Eder]

I'd just like to add that it is also important to know for the gifts, which gift to get him or her

thank you

[Proteus_MST]

I'd just like to add that it is also important to know for the gifts, which gift to get him or her

thank you

Perhaps one of the things s/he likes most.
I mean, if it is a girl and she likes to play soccer ... maybe a ball would be a good gift ... or tickets for one of the matches of her favorite soccer club
and if it is a boy and he likes to play with Barbies, there surely are some dolls of the Barbie collection he doesn't have yet

[Bereta_Eder]

you can't give a boy a barbie!!!! he'll turn gay!!!!!!!!!!!!

only guns.

actually him liking barbies and playing with girls (not the right way) is an inidcator he might be homosexual.