How about you explain why your definition of "individuality" is something anyone should care about.
At this point I should admit I have not really invested an immense amount of time into figuring this out, but still may be useful: when we value something merely because it is different or because it was freely chosen, it suggests it is not much better than other things or else we would like it for its actualy betterness. So people may customize their body or car to look a bit different than most others so that they can show they are different individuals (cue Life of Brian here) or that they choose some things autonomously instead of accepting the default choice, but all these things are not so important.
However when something is important we usually want it the best, we don't want 100 different ways of manufacturing nails just that every factory can play special snowflake, we want one most efficient way and every factory adopting it. When things matter, and some things are better than others, then reasonable people don't play special snowflakery and don't go for an individual, custom solution just to show off their non-conformism.
So I have a generic vision of reasonable people wanting to do things the best way, uniformly, but when something does not matter much or one way is not so much better than the others then they relax the unformity and it is okay to play special snowflakery and customize everything and express our oh so awesome nonconformism in them.
I think this must make sense, I am just not so sure anymore that it is really relevant to the question. As I have to admit things like memories do not fall either of these buckets. As for overriding my personality, well, if highly inefficient ways of dealing with some problems are considered part of one's personality (i.e. habits) why do you think I am even here on LW? That is pretty much the whole point. This whole website is all about trying to get as close to the self-rewriting AI as our biological hardware allows.
However when something is important we usually want it the best, we don't want 100 different ways of manufacturing nails just that every factory can play special snowflake, we want one most efficient way and every factory adopting it.
Assuming we know in advance what that is, and that it won't change as circumstances change. The point of individuality is that in general the only way to find out the efficiency of a method is by trying it. Hence if a factory owner has a new crazy idea for how to manufacture nails, let him try it (without having to convin...
I previously wrote a post hypothesizing that inter-group conflict is more common when most humans belong to readily identifiable, discrete factions.
This seems relevant to the recent human gene editing advance. Full human gene editing capability probably won't come soon, but this got me thinking anyway. Consider the following two scenarios:
1. Designer babies become socially acceptable and widespread some time in the near future. Because our knowledge of the human genome is still maturing, they initially aren't that much different than regular humans. As our knowledge matures, they get better and better. Fortunately, there's a large population of "semi-enhanced" humans from the early days of designer babies to keep the peace between the "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" factions.
2. Designer babies are considered socially unacceptable in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the technology needed to produce them continues to advance. At a certain point people start having them anyway. By this point the technology has advanced to the point where designer babies clearly outclass regular babies at everything, and there's a schism between "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" humans.
Of course, there's another scenario where designer babies just never become widespread. But that seems like an unstable equilibrium given the 100+ sovereign countries in the world, each with their own set of laws, and the desire of parents everywhere to give birth to the best kids possible.
We already see tons of drama related to the current inequalities between individuals, especially inequality that's allegedly genetic in origin. Designer babies might shape up to be the greatest internet flame war of this century. This flame war could spill over in to real world violence. But since one of the parties has not arrived to the flame war yet, maybe we can prepare.
One way to prepare might be differential technological development. In particular, maybe it's possible to decrease the cost of gene editing/selection technologies while retarding advances in our knowledge of which genes contribute to intelligence. This could allow designer baby technology to become socially acceptable and widespread before "fully enhanced" humans were possible. Just as with emulations, a slow societal transition seems preferable to a fast one.
Other ideas (edit: speculative!): extend the benefits of designer babies to everyone for free regardless of their social class. Push for mandatory birth control technology so unwanted and therefore unenhanced babies are no longer a thing. (Imagine how lousy it would be to be born as an unwanted child in a world where everyone was enhanced except you.) Require designer babies to possess genes for compassion, benevolence, and reflectiveness by law, and try to discover those genes before we discover genes for intelligence. (Edit: leaning towards reflectiveness being the most important of these.) (Researching the genetic basis of psychopathy to prevent enhanced psychopaths also seems like a good idea... although I guess this would also create the knowledge necessary to deliberately create psychopaths?) Regulate the modification of genes like height if game theory suggests allowing arbitrary modifications to them would be a bad idea.
I don't know very much about the details of these technologies, and I'm open to radically revising my views if I'm missing something important. Please tell me if there's anything I got wrong in the comments.