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

[Labster]

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.

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

So, when you say we need to change one to fix the other, it was not immediately obvious why it was society should be the one that has to change.  You think society should change because that's your values.  They're my values too.

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.

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.