I know because it was burned in my memory when I re-watched the movie after finding out about H+ and becoming fascinated by it.

Like what?
Rich people are rich and getting richer? Poor people have indoor plumbing? Gay people expect civil rights?

I mean – what’s so different is the way people see the world and our place in it- not the world or how human society functions.

Predictions are often wrong*- and so not following them is practical – even smart.

Humans are obsessed with themselves. fashion, gossip, celebrity watch- none of this appears to be going away.
And – for reasons I lack articulation to explain- humans also will seize upon even the appearance of foolishness or weakness to defeat their neighbor, sometimes for no other reason than they can. It’s schadenfreude or “tall poppy” syndrome at it’s meanest.
So whoinhell wants predict anything interesting and get creamed for it twice- once when predicting it and again when it doesn’t happen?
And for entertainment- naked women, puppies, flawed human interaction (gossip) and shock have worked for millenia. All the StarTrek iterations knew this and stuck to it.

*The result, which is replicable across a wide range of experts and predictions, is that the actual value of the variable falls outside of the 98% confidence interval 30% of the time.

I repeat: 30%. For those of you who are skeptical and who are wondering where I’m getting this from, I was also skeptical when I first ran across this result, but it was cited as being from a very famous paper called “Judgment under uncertainty” by Tversky and Kahneman – Kahneman being the guy who just won the Nobel Prize in economics – and I checked the paper, and yeah, it’s there.
-Eliezer Yudkowsky, Feb 2003

Next Gen series were commercial productions for the masses. Politicial correct, predictable A-Z scenarios, no real evolving characters, somehow toe curling Americo-Christian even (in an Euro-libetarian view). You won’t find ‘decent’ things in newer series, apart from great acting and nice hours of entertainment. I am not critizing the great efforts that have been made, I am talking about truly innovative stuff.

For interesting things revert to the first series. Almost anything I can think of now came by years ago. Somehow. Coated in a 60′s/70′s dress maybe, but thoughtful and very inspiring. I still regard Star Trek TOS as one of the best series ever made. Besides some Doctor Who, Blakes Seven and Sapphire And Steel.

Watch ‘Sapphire and Steel’ if you don’t know this early 80′s series. It’s singularity plus plus. As a kid -look at my pic- I could not watch it while we were living in a small 18th century house in the woods. I couldn’t resist either. Even after some beaten up drunk guy died at our doorstep one night, for us to discover the next morning.

Ring a ring of rozes.

But it was good retcon.

Why is it illegal? I have no idea. I might presume to prevent the wealthy from overpowering the poor with super-kids, but given that there IS no wealth in the Federation, I don’t see why they can’t just genetically engineer everyone and have an entire race of advanced, super-intelligent humans.

I seem to remember that Q discusses the past of humanity in the very first episode and that, at some point, we were all badly-dressed, combat-drug addicts with guns attached to our arms. To prevent this fashion disaster from ever happening again, we were forced to give up all the COOL technology, until we eventually developed warp drive.

But anyway, there’s quite a few unique representations of transhumanism in Star Trek, the show just tries to keep them one of a kind, rather than exploring the actual impact these technologies would have.