I can just imagine a Kafkaesque future society where people are punished based on a predictive model that is nothing more than an overly complicated random number generator.
gwern summarizes it appropriately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14867898
The key claims about the film that gwern's argument builds on are false, though. E.g.: "in a setting where there are no genuine consequences to any of this, no genetic engineering, no embryo selection"
It is a rather central part of the story that genetic engineering and embryo selection are routine, and the principal protagonist is noteworthy because his parents did not use such techniques, and he was instead a "faith baby".
gwern is clearly criticizing something, but it's not what is actually portrayed in the film Gattaca.
(My headcanon is that the esoteric story of _Gattaca_ is that none of the supposed embryo selection or valid/invalid screens exist at all, any embryo selection is just ordinary IVF quality control for aneuploidy etc, there is only cheap universal sequencing developed by a totalitarian police state like the CCP (see: Zero COVID testing), and the classification exists to manufacture distinctions and divide families and punish/reward elite supporters; the Freemans were some lower 'wavering' class, grouped with religious minorities, as indicated by their dissenting 'natural' birth, and so they earned a valid vs invalid split within their family. It makes more sense than the actual story, anyway.)
* I've remarked elsewhere that _Gattaca_ is an example of how movies with a message tend to fail by loading the dice too heavily for one side, removing any 'moral dilemma', and it is no exception: we never see any evidence that Vincent is doing anything wrong or that he shouldn't go on the space mission. In fact, given his methodical penetration, high competency, motivation, and extraordinary success at getting into the mission, he shows that he should be selected for his moxie and chutzpah. So what _Gattaca_ should have done was to make the ending Vincent suddenly clutching his heart from the shock, and fade to black.
John Lang did a little video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD_2fVqEMk