[thegrimmest]

There are no traits that distinguish us from other animals. We're just a little bit smarter than apes, elephants, and dolphins, which has pushed us past a tipping point into civilization.

Our societies are still ecosystems, and cannot escape from the rules thereof. Competition, hierarchy, and economic inequality are emergent properties of ecosystems. There's nothing inhumane or immoral about an ecosystem.

[gadders]

A little bit? Like, computers designed by dolphins are only 16-bit? I'd say it was more than a little bit.

[thegrimmest]

A bit as in: on the spectrum of civilization-capable organisms, between bacteria and human beings, we're only a bit ahead of dolphins, which is where the tipping point happens to be. Aside from dolphins et al, this space was also occupied by our hominid ancestors.

It took us ~50,000 years to get to computers. We're not biologically different from humans then. Civilization itself is a new mechanism of transmitting information that dolphins do not possess (because they've not passed the tipping point) which allows transmission and accumulation across generations exponentially faster than DNA and culture (which dolphins do possess). We're also anatomically rather more suited to building things than dolphins.