People really do not change, it’s what they do. We are all still the same just have different procedures and do different things.

I don’t think human nature is any different than it was 2,000 yrs ago, but I do think that humankind has made progress, because technology gives us more choice in how we live our lives. It’s a better chance at happiness, even if it doesn’t always turn out that way.

As a practitioner of technology, I know that having written software makes me only a little bit more certain about how it responds to stimuli than other people. When it comes into contact with inputs I hadn’t anticipated, I still get that tightening of my sphincter as I anxiously fear my “baby” will fall over and stop functioning.

To reduce the frequency of those sphincter-tightening moments, I employ a whole lot of tests. Bench tests, unit tests, user-acceptance tests, etc. As I find errors, I handle them. Basically, I learn more about the condition of my software by putting it into situations I never anticipated than I would simply by writing it.

Humans are not altogether different. Put us into a situation, and we learn something about ourselves. Put a group of humans into a new situation, we learn about the human species. As technology makes new situations possible, we discover new responses from the human machine – sometimes ones we didn’t even anticipate based on past experience. It doesn’t mean that the human animal changed, it only means that our understanding of it has expanded.

For instance, an overabundance of food made possible by advanced agricultural technology, improved transportation, infrastructure, logistics, and free pizza delivery have increased the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other diseases physical and psychological. The human animal was never designed to withstand the dangers of abundance. We were designed to survive starvation scenarios. We always had the ability to suffer from abundance, we only recently encountered that situation due to our technology. How many other apparent changes in the human animal are merely extant conditions brought on by abnormal environmental stimuli provided by technological advancement.

If you’re allergic to alcohol, you would never know until you actually tried some. That’s a problem with the human animal that always existed but never surfaced until technology made the production and consumption of alcohol a reality. Technology only makes new situations or stimuli; we’re still the ones who have to respond to them.

Julius Caesar thought Rome’s advanced technological state had made his fellow Romans somehow less adept at surviving Gallic winters than their barbarian counterparts. His dependence on record-keeping had “weakened” his memory while his barbarian corollary had a strong memory for oral tradition and an ability to manage his tribe.

One thing I’ve noticed about technology, the more our tech allows us to achieve, the more our expectations increase. I was happy with a green screen and 8-bit animation on my 286 DOS machine in ‘87. My current machine can do so much more, but my expectations have increased as well. I play the same stupid strategy games, but the animations are better and the sound effects are more realistic. I don’t forget that I’m still pretending to conquer the European continent. Heck, Risk does the same thing, just not as well.

Caesar’s methods for managing an army were necessary to command that many men. Now that we have different expectations and armies that can number in the millions, our technology only enables us to do what we’ve always done, just on a much greater scale. It changes us, but only in the scope of what we want to accomplish; it hasn’t improved or degraded what we want to accomplish. Our base instincts toward waging war, pillaging our neighbors, acquiring obscene amounts of wealth, and screwing each other (literally and metaphorically) haven’t changed a bit. I think that the only thing that technology has changed is the scale of the game, not the game itself.

Heck, John, even the aliens in your books are ‘human’ in many ways, if you’ve given them the honor of some first-person narrator time.

There’s a novel by John Wynham called “Trouble with Lichen”, which deals with the social impact of a substance that increases human lifespans by a factor of 2 or 3. The point it makes is that you make very different decisions if you think you’re going to live to 200 than you do if you think you’re going to die by the time you’re 70. (That’s the novel’s contention. Personally, from what I know of my own decision-making, I wouldn’t consider it a certainty.) That’s science fiction, but haven’t we done the same thing in a slower and steadier way? Life expectancies are going up, which means lives take on a different shape.

I also thought about things like psychiatric meds, or hormone therapy for trans people. Do they change who you are, or just how you express it?

I guess it would have an awesome impact on my character and on my development as an individual.

Regarding:
“Grab a time machine, go back to ancient Egypt, and swap an infant there with an infant from today, and in twenty years you’ll likely find two people perfectly well integrated into their cultures because there is no difference in the human animal between now and then”

I’m not sure what that proves, as you removed those individuals before technology had the time to impact them.

I mean, what’s the null hypothesis in this thought experiment?

We still feel guilt–often socially-induced and completely illogical guilt. And I submit that while we might regard adultery, for example, as no longer quite as heinous a crime as we once did (I’ll let the married people on the thread deal with that), I at least still tend to react very badly to the breaking of promises. Especially formal promises, as in oath-taking. Out-of-wedlock children–we have a greater tendency NOT to blame or penalize the child, thank goodness, but if the whole concept were incomprehensible . . . well, the recent vice-presidential election might have been slightly different. And we are still very, very good at blaming the victim, or the bearer of bad news, or even the innocent bystander–for crimes committed by others. Aren’t we? (Unfortunately. I never said I liked everything about human nature.)

Achilles’ triggers in the Iliad may be different from ours–but I still read about real-life mothers who don’t want their sons (or daughters, these days) to go to war . . . and about sons who insist on going, for reasons that aren’t all that different from his. The cultural context is different, but not much more different from reading, say, a modern novel written in a foreign culture. The human motivations are still accessible, on some level. That’s one reason I read science fiction/fantasy, I think: the authors give me real human characters in unreal situations, and I get to think about what it means to be human . . . even if (or maybe especially if?) the characters in question are like aliens like John’s obi.

Now, about the physiology–I think you’ve got something there, but I’m not really qualified to consider it.

This is a great feature of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey… for instance, when we’re on the Moon flying to the area where the monolith was dug up, the view out of the windows shows the passing lunar landscape. But our characters aren’t gawping at that, they’re looking inside at each other and discussing their packed lunches and who’s got what in their sandwiches.

Mind you, I’ve been in planes since I was a few months months old in 1958 and being evacuated from Beirut to London, but I still go for a window seat and look out whenever I can, though the cabin crew make you close the blinds so that everyone else can watch movies in peace or not be woken in the morning by the rising sun. So I’d be looking out the windows on the Moon too.