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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you're really plugged into this. Is there really a contingent out there that thinks Gattaca[1] is a desirable outcome?

Edit; citing the movie as a widely known example of a stratified society with both engineered and non engineered humans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

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(Gattaca is a fictional movie, not a realistic outcome. What anyone thinks about it is irrelevant because it has not, will not, and could not happen, any more than Brave New World.) As far as making use of these techniques, certainly. Transhumanists, socialists, and 'liberal eugenicists' have always advocated 'seizing the means of reproduction', so to speak, but it's mostly been theoretical; modern behavioral genetics has fill in so many of the blanks that concrete discussions and analyses can be done, IVF embryo selection can be done right now, CRISPR can also be done now if you can find anything useful to do with it besides fixing rare genetic diseases, and IES and genome synthesis will be possible within the next 20 years.

Why do you say its unrealistic? Eugenics has been seriously considered in the past, and is likely to be seriously considered in the future.

If genetic modification and control becomes 'easy' and relatively safe I don't see why those in power wouldn't try to exercise control over that power. In that future its not hard to imagine lawmakers banning having children who would have inherited known genetic 'defects'.

Now imagine 'defects' are classified as having dark skin, or whats considered a 100 IQ today.

Gattaca is unrealistic because (aside from being intended as mass-market entertainment rather than a scientific extrapolation) it is simultaneously too aggressive and too conservative: it envisions a world in which instant genome sequencing can be done effectively for free on a global scale (which, as cheap as genome sequencing has become, does not seem likely to ever happen unless non-chemical-based processes are developed) while organizations use solely genetic information far beyond its predictive limits (set by heritability estimates, which are noticeably <100% for traits of interest like intelligence) and ignoring the overriding phenotypic information, but puts this in a setting where there are no genuine consequences to any of this, no genetic engineering, no embryo selection, all of which should make the society unrecognizable. If the Gattacaverse's scientific understanding and control of genetics were really as perfect as portrayed, none of the events would happen in the first place - it is ludicrous to imagine a world of genetically-engineered von Neumanns walking around and still needing human janitors, for example. Its poorly conceived world is mostly there as as simplistic grade-school-level allegory about 'how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover' with a genetics gloss. Which is fine as entertainment, but where we're going looks nothing like Gattaca.

>while organizations use solely genetic information far beyond its predictive limits (set by heritability estimates, which are noticeably <100% for traits of interest like intelligence) and ignoring the overriding phenotypic information,

Organizations cargo-cultishly over-emphasizing certain ability signals? Seems pretty realistic to me! "How many golf balls can fit in a bus..."

>but puts this in a setting where there are no genuine consequences to any of this, no genetic engineering, no embryo selection, all of which should make the society unrecognizable.

What? A key plot point was that parents go through a doctor to have kids, who then picks the genetically-best kid that the parents are capable producing. Those who don't (and have "god-children" or "de-gene-erates") end up with sicker, stunted kids.

Maybe that's short of maximizing the potential of the tech, but it seems like a genuine consequence.

>it is ludicrous to imagine a world of genetically-engineered von Neumanns walking around and still needing human janitors, for example.

Because they'd have automated it all? There will always be the 1% least-intelligent, who will take the roles that can't be automated. Perhaps it's unrealistic that someone would be mopping the floor, but that's just to save the viewer from having to be told "oh, 'janitors' now just press buttons and visually inspect the work of machines".

It is not realistic. Look at NASA - do they mindlessly go 'you must have X DNA' or do they do testing, like the women astronauts?

> Maybe that's short of maximizing the potential of the tech, but it seems like a genuine consequence.

It's not, because you get literally the same consequence by not genetically testing sperm/eggs at all and simply screening by motility and donor health etc - people who don't do that have kids with more defects. And 'short of maximizing the potential' is exactly my point. A world with perfect genetic prediction and too-cheap-to-meter sequencing simply will not look like that. Some healthier kids are the least of the consequences of generations of society-wide embryo selection with perfect prediction and universal sequencing.

> Because they'd have automated it all?

Yes. Assuming it's still even an issue.

> but that's just to save the viewer from having to be told "oh, 'janitors' now just press buttons and visually inspect the work of machines".

A movie is nothing but what it depicts.

>It is not realistic. Look at NASA - do they mindlessly go 'you must have X DNA' or do they do testing, like the women astronauts?

They did further testing in the movie too! Note the treadmill tests that the protagonist was cheating on too.

But in terms of a general, big-org failure to properly use heuristics? Probably the most realistic part of the movie!

>A movie is nothing but what it depicts.

And some things have to be understood metaphorically because it would be too cumbersome to have to present the full picture and bring the viewer up to speed. That's just how the medium works.

For the story, it suffices that there exist people who do more tedious jobs because smarter people get the better ones. To show a more realistic scenario (janitor checking rooms on a tv screen and pushing buttons rather than mopping), for every dimension that changes, would take away precious minutes from the runtime for little narrative benefit.

Gattica didn't have many large generations of engineered children. The movie happened during a transitionary period.

>which, as cheap as genome sequencing has become, does not seem likely to ever happen unless non-chemical-based processes are developed

It seems pretty much inevitable that genome sequencing will use non-chemical (non sequencing-by-synthesis) methods in the future (I've worked for two companies that have developed such techniques with varying degrees of success). In the far-ish future I think we'll see a human genome for 1 to 10USD with a turn-around time of maybe 10 to 20mins. That seems pretty achievable using a solid-state nanopore approach.

I think even novel labeled/SBS approaches might be able to do interesting things here.

When I watch Gattaca, to support my suspension of disbelief, I choose to retcon the sequencer technology a bit.

On the presumption that 99.9% of the people using the system are never going to act on information disclosed by the system in a manner that would not involve returning to the established system as a middleman, it simply cheats. Random samples of DNA are tested and sequenced, and a machine learning system leans heavily on databases of stored information to extrapolate findings that might be of interest to the customer.

Most people of Gattaca don't have a deep understanding of genetics. They just know what the computers tell them.

As such, pretending to be another person with donated biological samples is the low-budget option for evading the system. Those with enough power and resources pay to hack the system itself, such that the ubiquitous sequencers report more favorable results than they otherwise would.

This also means that a lot of the parents buying designer babies were getting placebo. If there was no obvious congenital defect, the docs just left the natural genome alone, and simply told the parents it was the best baby they could possibly have, while marking the genetic samples kept for reference as "valid". Yeah, that's right, I made the dystopia even worse in my own imagination. Not only is the society stratified by money, the foundation is 99% fraud.

Wait a sec. If this dystopic future you cite is able to genetically engineer embryos, then wouldn't everyone be able to reproduce? (Less-fit people would obviously pass on less of their genes.)

And while your complaint about skin color is certainly valid, why do you abhor making humanity smarter on average?

*IES being Iterated Embryo Selection - the concept of shortening generation times to months or less by producing gametes from selected embryos and crossing those until you have embryos with the genotypes you desire, so we could breed human strains on the same timescale as mice. An important caveat is that we wouldn't see the phenotypic outcomes (behavioural or physical) until we let a generation mature, so selection will be entirely on the basis of trusting the SNPs that large studies have implicated - who knows if all of these SNPs would function well in concert?

To flesh out a large range of implications will take at least an effort worthy of a PhD dissertation.

With successful embryo selection, at least we can keep up with the increasingly higher minimum IQ needed to function well in advanced society and avoid a large underclass of unemployable people.

Jordan Peterson - IQ and The Job Market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

I find the underclass argument important and generally ignored. The whole drive for UBI is due in part to the fact that all but the most specialized human professions are being automated. Of course, specialization is not necessarily an indicator of intelligence, but I would guess that they are pretty correlated. Since intelligence is at least in part genetic (and the environmental portion seems to respond very poorly to poverty, which a UBI would likely put people in or close to), it is very likely that a society with UBI would have a very large generational underclass of those unable to sufficiently specialize enough for gainful employment.

If we can make more people capable of becoming specialized, everyone will benefit. Perhaps fields like medicine are limited in the number of people it would make sense to employ, but software engineering and scientific research pretty generally benefit the more people get involved (wrt software I am thinking more in terms of FOSS and startups, not huge teams for simple tasks). The barrier to participation in the future economy might end up essentially becoming IQ. It's important that we give people the tools to help their children be successful as the economy changes.

Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I'd rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.

The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people. That problem was the only reason Gattaca was so dystopian. As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult, it should be possible to move forward with engineering humans in a productive way.

The ladies who empty the trash here contribute more to society than I do. I just write throwaway apps for throwaway companies, they actually DO something.

You're free to quit your job and go empty peoples' trash if you really find it so much more meaningful.

It's as meaningful as it's thankless.

His lack of nobility does not invalidate his argument. Arguably, many of the most despised jobs are most important. None of the elite would or could do them, and without society would fall apart. On the other hand, a very large percentage of elite jobs could be eliminated without ill effect.

Our role as the elite is to elevate and recognize their worth, and not sink them to our moral level.

Then this is a poor example. I can certainly empty my own trash - I do that at home. It's far more efficient to have one person with no education or special skills come around and collect everyone's trash into a big container once per day than to have hundreds of skilled, expensive employees empty their own trash when it gets full.

But you can empty the trash and they can't build your apps.

Also, when thinking about creating value, you need to think about scale. They change your trash and are limited by their physical ability and time. Let's say they saved you 4 minutes and changed 400 trashes, saving 399 other people 4 minutes. They've created ~24 hours of value.

If your app helps people save 30 seconds a day and did that for 100k people, then you created about 12 days more value.

Your argument can easily go the other way. What if your app wastes 30 seconds a day for 100k people? By, say, building addictive mobile games, or a social network dedicated to watching food pictures, or gambling websites, or, like the parent comment said, throwaway apps.

If an app provides entertainment then it wastes time?

What app does save people 30 seconds? Perhaps they didn't use the app before, and now it's wasting the time of thousands?

At the very least the lady emptying the trash keeps the place hygienic, reducing the spread of diseases.

If you're getting paid it means what you're doing means something to someone, even if it doesn't mean anything to you.

But wait. If all they do is empty your trash, and you do nothing worthy of merit, then by extension, that tangible thing they do to support your work is equally meaningless.

If the world economy could eliminate your job without missing it, then you are no longer generating trash to clean up, and that job goes away too. The person who cleans up after someone genuinely productive therefore contributes more than someone who cleans up after someone useless.

This is, no doubt why we pretend with all the might of imagination that certain jobs are critical and vital to the economy. The idea that double-digit percentages of the whole world economy could actually just be wasted on useless navel-gazing nonsense is just too horrible to consider. It may be true, but if we believe it is true, that just means we're all wasting our lives on pointless bullshit. I'd rather lie to myself and be happy, regarding this particular point.

>As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult

Keeping people from discrimination may be about as difficult as perfecting genetic engineering.

> Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I'd rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.

If you are looking for bang for the buck in raising the average IQ across the whole population, then there are serious quick wins in eliminating things that drag it down. For instance, exposure to lead. And it's doable, hardly rocket science or genetic engineering.

If you're looking for a few very rich people to give their offspring another advantage over the rest, then genetic engineering becomes more pertinent.

why can't have both, "eliminating things that drag it down" + genetic engineering?

You can have the first if you have a government with sufficient sense and compassion, it's been that way for a long time - and to be fair a lot of issues have been reduced or eliminated over the decades. e.g. Leaded vehicle fuel is a thing of the past.

You can have the second at some time in the future if the research works out and you can afford it.

If we're going to act like we're a bunch of smarty-pants engineers here, it seems rational to start with the low hanging fruit: environmental toxins.

In addition to facing fewer ethical pitfalls, greatly reducing these environmental factors is well within our current means. It also universally beneficial, and not limited to those who can afford "Boutique" offspring.

Agreed. Wouldn't it be MUCH easier to, say, invest heavily in our early and middle education systems?

Much cheaper than eugenics.

http://abstrusegoose.com/502

>The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people.

You can't be naive enough to think that this problem wouldn't occur. On the contrary, if genetic engineering on such a level was realized (which would require a shift in our current biomedical ethics to begin with), discrimination against the less-optimized would be a foregone conclusion.

In such a scenario, we could only hope that everyone would be optimized equally and the suboptimal humans wouldn't be born into a world where they are second class citizens.

> In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society

Do you have any data to back this up? Do you have a reliable measure of "contribution to society"?

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