But at least we finally noticed we're robots, and we can use the skills of rationality to hop off our habit treadmills and pursue our values instead.
How do you determine whether you've really hopped off the treadmill, vs. using higher-order desires as a sophisticated long-term strategy to spread your genes and memes? (Is this covered in the book?)
Does it matter? Your genes and memes basically are who you are. They contain most of the necessary information to make you you, you can not exist without the information describing you existing (however hidden or unavailable it may be to any particular mind) as well!
Freedom in any reasonable sense is the ability to make the future universe will end up in states that you find desirable. Altering the fitness landscape or letting it stay just as it is are both valid courses of action to this goal, though the latter is very unlikely to be the wise choice for ...
The jacket text for Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion sums up the book well:
The book is an excellent introduction to the first stage of Yudkowskian philosophy: We are robots in a mechanistic universe running on a swiss army knife of cognitive modules. But at least we finally noticed we're robots, and we can use the skills of rationality to hop off our habit treadmills and pursue our values instead. These values are complex and often arbitrary, but we can use our reflective capacities to extrapolate our values based on "higher-order" desires, a desire for preference consistency, and other considerations. All this is argued for at length in Stanovich's book. The only thing missing is a discussion of what to do about all this when AI arrives.