I partly agree with you. I think we do need to augment/change our psychophysiology as you say and I think we are already doing this. We have done this through culture, psychotechnology, drugs , etc and all these things aim to change how humans operate in the world to improve the self and society. These things cannot exist without technology and society and their true purpose is to self replicate and create better technology which will lead to a singularity and so on.
Although we are a blip in this evolution tree of 'technology' I do think we can improve our condition in this local space which is part of the larger evolutional space.
Maximizing empathy could be a way but forms of this have been tried through ideas such as effective altruism etc. Maximizing self centeredness or empathy will never work in my opinion because the universe is composed of "collaborative" systems where each agent in this system works locally to optimize some global objectives. Since these systems must cooperate and any agent that utilizes a = strategy that is too selfish or too altruistic will lose because other evolution will inevitably spawn a better strategy to that can exploit it. See the iterated prisoner's dilemma and how tit for tat is a good solution to it.
Human societies have always used technologies to modify the psychology of its constituents and evidence of this is all around us. An interesting technology that has now fallen out of interest in popular culture is propaganda. See the work of Jacques Ellul "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" where Ellul argues that technological society cannot exist without propaganda is propaganda is what allows humans to deal with the new issues technical society bares on them.