I make two points that "contradict" here: Primarily, I argue that we're a social species and cannot employ individuality without a culture and community. This

I make two points that "contradict" here: Primarily, I argue that we're a social species and cannot employ individuality without a culture and community. This contradicts any notion of being artificially programmed by a deus ex machina. On the contrary, we program and reprogram each other reciprocally and continuously. A strong AI shaping of human kind would be parasitic to existing practice, not a new thing. Kind of like how propaganda presupposes a practice of telling the truth. Second, and perhaps wrongly so, I address the seeming notion of difference being a moral good; a sentiment I interpret in your final sentence. I might very well have misunderstood it. Being different is not good, in and of itself. Striving to be different seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, because the internal resources cannot explode the context without a major risk of ending up in social vacuity, where your actions are systemically misinterpreted and the individual itself misinterpret his or herself on the rebound. The so-called historical individual in Hegel , Nietzsche's grand most free of all superman, relies on contingent reality to succeed; in other words, the successful "being different" is a harmony of the individual's actions and intentions with existing but as of yet unexpressed social trends. Again, individuality presupposes sociality, completely opposing the view that "true individuality" is so rare. It's unfair to the ant to talk about them in human terms, and I am not an expert in ants. But a human being expressing her taste is an expression of her individuality, even though it's exactly the same thing "everyone else" think as well. What matters is that it expresses her as an individual, not that it differs from the majority.