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Could technological society cause the proliferation of “inhuman” behavioral traits? And could such an outcome be unfavorable even if it were a technologically-utopian society? When I imagine the end goal of human existence — when all obligations and all unnecessary stresses are eliminated — it’s something like an eternal state of playfulness and “deep” emotion. The deep emotions are friendship, love, awe, wonder, tranquility. These to me are intuitively terminal. So the optimal end goal of human existence is to optimize for these propensities. These traits or propensities are superior to, say, an eternal state of playfulness where people do combat sports for fun. A terminal enjoyment of striking another for fun is inherently inferior to a terminal enjoyment of singing odes to beauty, love, and peace. If we imagine two paradises, the fighter’s paradise would exist on a lower level.
But what if industrial society causes the proliferation of traits whose terminal values are something like “neurotic competing over social superiority” or “enjoying puzzles”? These are selected for today, and if you have both of these traits you can make loads of money. And that’s all well and good when they are instrumental to keeping the economic engine churning. But what if if changes human nature? A paradisal state where people do puzzles and aggressively fight and subvert each other to obtain the highest status also strikes me as an inferior paradise. While instrumentally useful right now, it can change human nature for the worse.
I think it’s at least somewhat true. What modern technological society tends to do is uproot deeper communities. Modern societies are often highly individualized, and often uprooted from traditional culture and extended families. And I think the destruction of those things tend to create a lack of empathy in society. In a traditional society, most people are friends, family or acquaintances— people you’d know by name and greet on the streets. Any decision you made you knew was going to either help or hurt the community you actually lived in. And it does make a difference. If I make the choice to lay people off and I work in that factory and live in that town, it’s impossible for me to completely remove myself from the human side of the equation because I’ve actually met the people about to lose their jobs. Maybe they go to my church, maybe my wife plays cards with his wife, maybe I just pass him on the streets, and I worked with him. He’s a human.
And in most discussion of war crimes and the like one of the first things done is to dehumanize the subjects of abuse. They aren’t real people, they don’t have families or needs or wants. Except that especially in the high up positions in society where those decisions are made, we’ve sort of accidentally dehumanized people in our own society through abstraction. The person deciding to lay people off at a factory he’s never been to and in a country he can’t find on a map only sees them as numbers on a spreadsheet. They aren’t depriving a human of a means of supporting themselves and their families, they’re reducing headcount. It’s impersonal, sterilized of any thought that you’re the cause of human suffering. And a lot of decisions made at the top end up working that way. If you’re fighting a war, you do it by drone and aircraft and long range missiles, not stabbing someone with a sword. Make hurting people distant and done at the push of a button and there’s no pause to think about it.
The other thing is that our relationships are shallower. We have a loneliness epidemic in America where very few people have a close friend (someone they can rely upon to help them and who they’d likewise help if they were in serious trouble). Most people have moved away from family and maybe only see siblings and cousins a couple of times a year. This doesn’t help develop empathy and might make people more comfortable dehumanizing other people. If you’re only talking through the screen and rarely close to other people, it’s easy to dismiss the other person.
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I think that technocapital has already selected for "inhuman" traits in some populations (though I do think calling it "inhuman" is maybe not the most descriptive, because traits that humans have are definitionally human traits). These traits are the ones that make people more effective as components in the civilizational machine, the populations are the more heavily historically "civilized" ones, and there is a lot of crossover with the cultural traits identified as the "aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture" in the infamous smithsonian infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333#slideshow/1610610).
Individuality, neuroticism, self-reliance, "protestant" work ethic, respect for rules, avoidance of overt conflict, objective/linear thinking, etc are all traits that are unusual in pre-civilizational humans and that make for better members of civilization, and I think that technocapital has selected for those traits in humans both biologically and memetically/culturally.
All of this to say, it's not "What if it changes human nature?", that ship has sailed. The question is "What's anyone doing to take technocapital out of the driver's seat?", and the answer is "pretty much nothing, Kaczynski and Land are right, we are not our own masters, and it's acceleration from here on out."
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