Hacker Cinema
Gattaca
1997 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Andrew Niccol
Vincent is an all-too-human man who dares to defy a system obsessed with genetic perfection. He is an "In-Valid" who assumes the identity of a member of the genetic elite to pursue his goal of traveling into space with the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation.
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279 comments on Hacker News
The movie Gattaca deals with this theme and it has a good plot too!
Gattaca was such a good film.
>The movie did have an unfortunate eugenic implication
You’re thinking of dysgenic, not eugenic.
Gattaca is a movie about eugenics.
A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude that what happened in the work of fiction is an inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the story had these comments all over it.
> I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly.
and
> Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca.
and
> I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it's virtually identical to the movie's premise.
I think the ironic thing in the LLM case is that these people have outsourced their reasoning to a work of fiction and now are simple deterministic parrots of pop culture. There is some measure of humor in that. One could see this as simply inter-LLM conflict with the smaller LLMs attempting to fight against the more capable reasoning models ineffectively.
Good article. I found this part the most damning:
> "We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models," Winthrop says, "and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources."
... and am somehow reminded of the movie Gattaca.
Gattaca, the movie, was way ahead of its time.
Thanks for sharing this.
It made me wonder where a future goes when it keeps trying to define both barbarism and normalcy.
As a small tribute in return, three films came to mind:
Bicentennial Man,
Gattaca,
Fight Club.
I’ve always preferred Ivan the Fool — choosing to live, rather than living inside a definition.
I think a more common thing is people treating movies as real. “Gattaca explained why this is bad”. “Torment Nexus blah blah”.
I think Gattaca is a more relevant movie here.
Are there any signs in the movie Gattaca that the society is militaristic or surveils the population at all?
I don't remember any.
This was covered in mainstream press (maybe WSJ?) a couple years ago.
I think renewed interest because of its plot points in Materialists. https://www.gq.com/story/materialists-leg-lengthening
I forgot it was in Gattaca right? That was an outstanding movie, should watch again.
There has been a weird emphasis on height even greater than in the past, maybe from online dating?
Short kings have been featured in SNL. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2Wc-nLNHtl/?hl=en
I’m shorter than Frank, and I never thought it was that much of an impediment, but I wonder if culture has moved to prioritize it even more in dating and careers? Frank had a wife, so it’s interesting how it persists.
Well, there went the modicum of youthful ignorance I used to tell myself that Gattaca was just a movie and can't hurt me.
This was the premises for the movie Gattaca (1997). One of my favorite movies as a kid.
I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it's virtually identical to the movie's premise.
1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.
There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.
Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
The movie Gattaca addresses this very topic.
Finally my favorite movie Gattaca is coming to life.
What will be interesting is there's a lot of recent work to suggest IQ/personality differences can be seen through physiognomy, and it'll be interesting to see if as this tech gets better, the people who go through this process start having similar looking children.
Fertility care often already included testing for common genetic disorders, and parents with a history of severe disease would often make the hard choice to try again. Due to recent Theocratic political shifts, it means more families will face the worst possible life for their children.
Gattaca was a film years ahead of its time, and raises the question of what happens when people try to "fix" human beings beyond disease prevention. A subtle, but important ethical difference. =3
My point is that there are no 'genuine consequences'. We are told that supposedly there is selection and that the predictive power is nearly perfect and everyone relies on solely genetics to do everything; and yet, we do not see a world which reflects such effects at all. This worldbuilding does not make sense from a scientific perspective. Instead, what we see is a world in which you have extremely cheap sequencing in a panopticon and a caste society based on seemingly-random arbitrary discrimination with no actual consequences to any supposed inferiority or superiority*, akin to the classification of supposedly-objective 'classes' in North Korea where everyone is finely graded on hereditary loyalty to the elites but could be knocked down a rung at any time for suspected disloyalty.
(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.
> gwern summarizes it appropriately
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.
That's exactly what Gattaca is about. The fact that the machine scans your genes is honestly quite irrelevant and probably the biggest thing that everyone gets wrong about that movie: Everyone blindly trusts the scanner, but such a scanner cannot possibly exist.
gwern summarizes it appropriately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14867898
Reminiscent of the movie Gattaca.
Anyone remember the movie Gattaca?
ok how about the plot of the movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
that's definitely coming and those babies aren't just lucky.
Suggest watching the movie gattaca to understand what happens to kids of parents who think like this in an extreme version. The problem is if you ignore the reality of the competition it’s basically setting your kid up to fail due to prisoner dilemma dynamics.
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
Gattaca will always be a classic! Fun easter egg for those that didn't notice: the movie name is spelled only with DNA sequence letters.
This fixes the issue with leaks. But it creates a much worse issue: anyone can now sequence anyone else's DNA with zero oversight or privacy controls.
The film Gattaca covers how this could lead to a sort of night are society pretty well, I highly recommend it.
It also makes it much much harder to use the data for clinical research.
Human embryos obtained in vitro are human beings and subjects with rights: their dignity and right to life must be respected from the first moment of their existence. It is immoral to produce human embryos destined to be exploited as disposable "biological material". In the usual practice of in vitro fertilization, not all of the embryos are transferred to the woman's body; some are destroyed. Just as the Church condemns induced abortion, so she also forbids acts against the life of these human beings. It is a duty to condemn the particular gravity of the voluntary destruction of human embryos obtained "in vitro".
— Donum Vitae, 22 February 1987, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html
See also the 1997 film Gattaca https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
I think when trying to debate something, the idea should be to try to convince the other person. That sounds stupidly obvious, but it's really not. Imagine you're debating somebody over something and resorted to an argument over the exact meaning of terms that, to people who might not share your worldview, would be completely obvious. It's unlikely you'd really be persuading them of anything.
I think the more salient point is that even if you assume clear racial distinctions, and even substantial racial differences, that still does not justify any sort of racial ideology. The movie Gattaca works as an oddly perfect metaphor for racial ideologies and its problems. Gattaca was about genetics, but it's not a coincidence that it fits perfectly with race, as it's literally the exact same problem.
Just because somebody is a part of a group with some sort of a negative correlation, does not mean that person will inherently let that trait dominate them. Incidentally the reverse is also true - just because somebody may e.g. have a high IQ does not mean they will inherently be knowledgeable or wise. It's okay to consider group tendencies, but at the end of the day individuals are able to rise far above or fall far below their "expectation", and so it's important to judge each person not by the makeup of their genetics, but by the content of their character.
> will we eventually get into a situation where a swab on the water glass tells potential employer much more than the interview?
So GATTACA (1997), a recommended movie treating the genetic discrimination, genoism, as main plot.
I don't think we will live to see it technologically speaking, but eventually our descendants may live through such hell of statistical speculation.
I watch a lot of films, mostly older ones these days, I don't want to estimate how many.
This film has haunted me with its beauty. Not as airy as Mallick's work, a little softer than Aronofsky (The fountain, black Swan are masterpieces).
I think Mr. Nobody attempts a weaker version of this film, cloud atlas also.
Gattaca, inception, 2001, kpax maybe.
I loved Gattaca. I've seen it many times.
I tried to like Anon, but I didn't. Same thing with another one his movies, "In Time"
I think Gattaca is also fascinating for its freshman part in Andrew Niccol's opening "trilogy" as writer (and mostly director). More people remember the sophomore work The Truman Show (in part perhaps because it was the film that Niccol didn't direct), and Simone is mostly forgettable but still worth mentioning in the way it sort of caps the "trilogy".
I think that bittersweet hopefulness and a sense of lightness (humor) in the dystopian darkness of that opening "trilogy" is partly what Niccol seems to have lost as his career has progressed from those first three efforts. It's possible to even blame Simone's critical failure for that, he leaned harder into the humor and got burnt at the box office and maybe over-corrected too hard back to even grimmer, more bland, and more action focused movies. Hard to blame someone doing what sells, but interesting to miss the weirdness and also the bittersweet hope of the opening salvo.
Gattaca is such a beautiful film. The future is decidedly Dystopian but the message is so hopeful and the settings / scenes are wonderful to look at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn_gUcCO-gM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNI13VpPOA
I'm the type to sometimes feel overwhelmed by the bad things going on, but it's telling that Gattaca, in a terrible future, tells a hopeful story that despite the depths of a dark future you can still claim some victories.
What do you mean by poorly grown? A robust neanderthal skull can handle injuries from megafauna better. Our better strategy (potentially through more developed language), finer weapons, and slightly better ballistic aim combined to make us the better hunter. The evolutionary pressure for robust facial structure was not there - we evolved in a hot environment where a more lithe body was better adapted to long-distance persistence hunting.
Also, GATTACA is a gem of a movie.
Reminder of the film Gattaca which explored some of the risks of leaking your DNA in a future dystopia.
Swing by archive.org, they have full movies!
This one is next in my watch list:
https://archive.org/details/Gattaca
I've also "discovered" their software tab recently.
The 90s with its apolitical cinema like Saving private Ryan or Forrest gump that certainly are not pro american propaganda or other great movies like the Matrix that do not denounce late stage capitalism as soul crushing and has no themes that could be interpreted about taking red pills and feeling more like yourself.
The 90s had a different context sure, capitalism was peaking, we didn't have the crushing reality of the post 2008 world, or the crazy chest bumping Murica militarism of the post 9/11 era. But the 2000s scare, the internet fear, the office jobs being boring/grey and soulless. The slight fear of science and progress (see Jurassic park, gattaca, fifth element), the work culture being inhumane and dehumanising (matrix, office space, clerks, american beauty), the same happened in music with grunge being one of the main genres of the decades.
All of this art was made in the backdrop of probably the most optimistic period of time, Disney had a renaissance, america absolute cleared the floor in the first gulf war, the stock market had an impossible never ending rise, pop music was happier than ever and fashion was in the most sexy, thin, in your face hotness ever.
If you only want to enjoy the 90s happiness without seeing the fact tons of counter art was being made and that our current cyniscim isn't only a product of the post 2008 economic stagnation but also comes from the seeds that were planted at the height of the cultural hedonism of the 90s then you are just straight ignoring some of the biggest hits of that decade.
Isn't this what most of the world is saying to environmental activists who argue that we should go back to pre-industrial levels of production to "save the Earth"?
I for one think that indeed there are many cases like this where the only feasible way out is forward. The film GATTACA expressed this very human sentiment well:
> You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.
Many of which can also have lots of good intent. I would not blame a doctor for wanting to do genetic testing to look for specific markers. But the whole plot of the movie Gattaca is employers and insurance companies discriminating against people due to risks, even if the risks are small because they can find people without those risks. (Which often creates a self fulfilling prophesy of gene-socioeconomic class status. Scifi not always about future issues...). The problem with cliques is that we get annoyed at them but we do seem to keep forgetting that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But maybe cliques aren't good because they don't end up reminding us but instead teach us to ignore them and convince ourselves we've learned the lesson because we know the clique.
It was illegal in the movie Gattaca too, but they explained it by suggesting companies / insurance will just invisibly discriminate anyway which I think is most likely where this will end up in the real world
You just described the major plotline of the movie Gattaca.
We watched and discussed that movie in my Ethics of Engineering course in university.
Kind of ironic to me that the movie they used to try and teach me how not to use engineering for unethical purposes may be coming true today.
Edit: Wiki page for the movie if anyone's curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
Pretty good movie from what I recall. Some good discussions around ethics that came out of it.
Gattaca is fiction, with more attention given to having a good story than to realism.
Which was a success, it is a good story, and a movie I recommend.
What I think is that Gattaca, like most good dystopian fiction feels much more realistic than it really is, almost visionary. It is by design, it is a reflection of real world issues that readers/spectators are familiar with at the time of the writing, pushed to the extreme, and our natural negativity bias tend to make us forget the parts where the story was wrong in its terrible predictions.
Gattaca while a great movie always rubbed me wrong as at the end it turns out society was "right" and he doomed the mission. His heart was "bad" it turns the whole movie from someone overcoming societal limitation to someone ruining the space mission so they can see space.
Yes, I wrote about that when this all first started happening. Not that anybody cared... it doesn't take a whole lot to be able to identify you given some samples of your extended family. And as a means of elimination it will be extremely effective.
Gattaca is an amazing movie, it has aged so well I find myself having more and more appreciation for the amount of thought that went into the script.
Reminds me of the movie Gattaca https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
Anton Freeman : Vincent! How are you doing this Vincent? How have you done any of this? We have to go back.
Vincent : It's too late for that. We're closer to the other side.
Anton Freeman : What other side? You wanna drown us both?
Vincent : You wanna know how I did it? This is how I did it Anton. I never saved anything for the swim back.
Vincent : There's no gene for fate.
Also featured in the movie Gattaca for access to the workplace.
for anyone intrigued and/or frightened by the first half of that, here's a context-sensitive recommendation for the film Gattaca (1997) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
baby steps... and then you have the movie gattaca.
Check out a great sci-fi movie named Gattaca.
Remember that you shed cells everywhere you go, so soon the tech will be advanced enough where we can do nearly real-time DNA matching. If you sneeze, a sniffer could pick that up and figure out who you are.
Imagine a camera that films not things that are visible, but people who were there, at that protest, in that store, in that hospital, boarding that plane. It's practically irrefutable (or currently legally is, even though it's inherently flawed.)
And you can never change that identifier. Once that data is out, it's out.
The last headline in that article, "Solving Crime Before It Happens" could have easily been entitled "Minority Report" (another great sci-fi movie that's not so fictitious anymore.)
Sounds like a good story but the movie (Taking Tiger Mountain) is mediocre, judging by the ratings. Fortunately there is Gattaca!
Imagine being one of the few natural born kids starting school in 2046. Half your class is named Chris because they are literally the clones of Chris Pratt/Pine/Hemsworth/Evans. It may seem impressive, but they really are only the generic bargain bin option for genetic engineering by then. The other half, the richer kids, are hyperintelligent chimeras of every most famous, intelligent, world class athlete, celebrity and model from the early 21st century mixed into a Select Blend. On your first day, the class watches Gattaca, and your teacher, GPT-12, discusses how many things the movie got wrong and how genetic discrimination is not bad at all.
I've noticed that some women seem to have a knack for estimating a man's IQ just by looking at their face. I suspect that it's not facial symmetry, but rather the eyes that provide them with the information that allows them to be so accurate.
Significant progress has been made over the past decade in related fields. Unlike in the movie 'Gattaca,' where one needed to mask their flaws using another's DNA, nowadays one must consider how many secrets are inadvertently revealed by allowing their face and retinas to be scanned.
Perhaps recent dictators, such as the late Saddam Hussein, were ahead of the curve with their constant sunglass-wearing.
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
There's a lot of great picks here, such as Gattaca, Man from Earth, Contact, The Matrix, Wall-E, Children of Men, The Fifth Element, 12 Monkeys. I would add Truman Show.
Depending on the individual and their patience, Primer (2004) might also be a great fit. The pace is a bid subdued but thematically, it's mind bending. I don't think it includes anything particularly awkward as an early scifi movie to watch together with your own child. I would probably start with one of the spectacles from the above picks, though.
I haven't seen these mentioned yet: Galaxy Quest, The Fifth Element, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, Bicentennial Man, Alita: Battle Angel (some of these may be PG-13)
Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. are also good animated movies, although Treasure Planet is more science-fantasy.
I'd also second Back to the Future, Contact, Interstellar, Gattaca, October Sky
Gattaca, Moon, Gravity, Contact, Space Camp, Andromeda Strain, the original Westworld (1973), the first two Star Trek movies. The STTNG TV series, Another Earth (2011, PG-13), The Man from Earth.
The recent Dune movie is excellent and is rated PG-13. Same with Gattaca.
> But using the "true details" (who cares if it's Ethan Hawk or Tom Cruise or whoever in Gattaca when you're discussing the relevance of the genetic engineering aspects of it) as a measure of how trustworthy someone is? That's just ridiculous to me, especially because for most conversations it doesn't matter.
It depends. In this example, if the listener says "I don't think it was Tom Cruise in that movie" and the speaker says "Whatevs, that doesn't matter", then sure, it didn't matter.
If the speaker said "No, it WAS Tom Cruise", then obviously it does matter. You can't know whether it matters or not until you express doubt.
> It's only a matter of time before we have technologies to change our genetic code or at least the genetic code of two cells before they form an embryo.
I suggest watching the movie 'Gattaca' ;-)
Seriously though, it is really good
Interesting tidbit about the movie: Andrew Niccol, the director, wanted to make The Truman Show, but he couldn't get funding for it without enough of a track record. So instead, he made Gattaca which had a low budget. Its success allowed him to fund The Truman Show.
I'm perhaps in the minority of people here, but I didn't like Gattaca, because I thought it actually didn't approach any of the nuance of the genetics discussion, instead opting for a pretty inane oversimplification. Perhaps it makes for an entertaining movie, but it's not a deep philosophical piece.
In the movie, the "bad guys" believed that your potential is limited by your genetics. Which is trivially true. But, weirdly, the movie decides this is the thing that needs to be disproven, and goes on to show the main character "overcoming his potential", which is, by the definition of the word "potential", not possible. Showing a fictional character swimming faster than he's supposed to be able to doesn't persuade me that people can overcome their potential.
As someone with a disorder which has a genetic component, I don't feel that anyone is doing me any favors by this naive polyanna-ism. There are things I cannot do as a result of my genetics, and it would be good for no one, including me, to assume otherwise. In fact, not understanding my own limitations has been one of the most destructive forces in my life, and identifying and acknowledging those limitations has had immense positive results for me.
And very few people, even among literal eugenicists, believe that genetics are the only thing that determines our potential. Most people understand that both nature and nurture are components of one's potential.
So basically, Gattaca is a movie that disprove something that is true, and that even the bad guys don't believe is the whole picture.
Where the bad guys in the movie go wrong isn't that genetics determine what your potential is (they do), but what to do about it. In the movie, a person's genetics are used to determine all sorts of far-reaching effects about their life.
But if we understand that both nature (genetics) and nurture play a part, then it becomes obvious that just because a person has optimal genetics for a certain trait, doesn't mean they'll actually reach the full potential of that trait. Someone with suboptimal genes for that trait might more fully realize the potential of those genes, and surpass the person with better genes for that trait.
And further, we might some day be able to associate genes with traits to the point where we know what genes are optimal for certain traits, but it would be extreme hubris to think we really understand what traits are optimal for a job or task. At my college the math requirements for a CS degree exceeded the math requirements for a math minor: and I barely ever use above 8th grade math in my almost two decades as a programmer. If we could test genetic predisposition for math ability, testing programmers for those genes would be counterproductive: not because programmers might overcome their potential for math ability, but because math isn't really all that relevant to programming. It's a losing game trying to align these traits better: the needs of jobs change over time, so the genetically-ideal candidate for a job today won't be the genetically-ideal candidate when the job changes tomorrow.
The movie is noticeably sparse in its explanations of how they define "intelligence", for example. And defining "intelligence" is a pretty difficult task.
The real-life bad guys (eugenicists) get this wrong too: certain races have traits that others don't (white people are most susceptible to skin cancer, for example!) but we have no way of weighing the traits of each race against another race to determine that any one race is superior.
And if we get down to my personal belief on this, it's that everyone is worthy of love, full stop (unconditionally). Conditioning your care for another human being on their genetics is the antithesis of that.
That doesn't mean, however, that we should pretend that genetic advantages don't exist. As I shared before, I have some less-than-ideal genes, and that's a real thing I have to consider in my day-to-day, and a real consideration for me should I ever choose to have children. Of course I'm still a valid human with all the rights that come with that. But that doesn't mean I can somehow overcome those genes.
I see that fallingknife wasn't able to respond directly so I'll give a quote and response to something they said here:
>> no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined
> But we do live in that world. It was determined that I would never play in the NFL the day sperm met egg.
If you're arguing that the plot of the movie is implausible, yes I agree. It's using an extreme example to drive a point home as stories often do. But, for the sake of argument, there are a couple things I would say.
For one, I think the example of the NFL isn't great. American football is a fairly simple game that clearly favors a narrow set of characteristics. In that sense, I don't think there's any great societal harm that comes from excluding people that aren't as physically strong. The dynamics of the game aren't that complicated. People who are stronger will generally perform better. That's why the game exists: to see people push the limits of a narrow set of abilities.
I think Gattaca really has more to say about restricting people's access to a more general set of opportunities; ones for which we can define some standardized measures of success but whose dynamics are much more complicated. I think education and everything that comes from it fits into that category. In that area, there's a very real sense in which people who don't look the part are the target of prejudices that lessen their likelihood of success, regardless of ability.
That's what I meant when I said there's a long tail to every distribution. If you happen to fall in the long tail, you wouldn't want to be passed over just for having a certain characteristic. Ideally, we would be able to measure the characteristic we care about directly instead of depending on statistical likelihoods, as standardized tests like the SAT aim to do. But in practice this seems really hard to do reliably. There are still many reasons a person might get a bad score on the SAT and yet still possess some great qualities that the world could benefit from. That's why schools consider more than just test scores in applications. If the criteria by which we judge things are too simplistic, the results are worse. That's true for email spam filters and it's true for college admissions. Although maybe it's less true for the NFL.
Gattaca is hands down my favorite movie of all time.
From a dystopian future, where a determination ("not saving anything for the way back") can still make a difference against all odds. A love story, a friendship, and finally an unexpected act of goodwill and an ending that is both relieving and sad.
And all this on top of the great acting and cinematography!
>nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest)
no he isn't, he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest that temporary allowed the less fit/ gifted /engineered to still live / work near them and infiltrate at the right time
-- it's got a bit of that a heist/noir of criminal cat and mouse
Vincent uses criminal connections to pull the entire scheme off (the german), just like a bank heist in a film it feels fun for reasons that don't work without a movie's magic 'genre' control of tone/sympathy/agency etc.
similar to other problems we have today where 'compassion' politics actually harms the fittest members most
An old homeless loony stabbing a brilliant healthy young person today isn't a show of the former's fitness, it's because (there are other incentives for the) the fittest of society (elites) choose to not wipe out/exile/enslave the unfit for various reasons (inextricable from the society itself--labor dynamics, crime and fear being useful, christian virtue, etc)
Gattaca in the opening even says it's only because he was born in the 'early stages' of the transition
Actual 'meritocracy' safety and other values require ruthlessness and violence, which we already have as all states do, just distrubuted in one configuration (gattaca) versus another configuration (chaotic US today, versus say the safety of singapore, or dictatorship of north korea, or some other gattaca 2.0 where the Vincents aren't born at all because fertility is managed)
A society can distribute its coercion/violence/reward structure in different ways, vincent is just a defector in a trust game
Always reminds me of that lame smug 'Feynman negging woman at a bar' anecdote, how is defecting on social norms clever? that's literally the point of lying/cheating/stealing/littering etc, one individual wins a temp game at the harm of the environment / culture long term. Once a few men are rude / cads, reputation of the place declines and fewer girls show up, or only certain types and not others, etc. A higher status guy like F can avoid/internalize the social ding of resentment from others who lose out of the good vibe/meeting someone cool while he's there, but can't tell him off.
Managing mini social games everywhere is 'culture' and essentially the reason infinite invisible class norms are so 'stifling' and invisible at once, it excludes the riff-raff and keeps those included people on their toes, behaving in a way that makes the place/group/experience "rich" rather than the vincent-like 'richness' of just maxing his own experience at cost of group.
(essentially why costume dramas are so fun to watch for girls (me included, I just don't lie to myself lol) as a guilty pleasure that doesn't feel like a guilty pleasure (you claim it's high status reasons -- the set design, jane austen, the history, so well written!!! etc) -- But the ideology of the genre of the movie itself does all the heavy lifting on cost of the 'nice things' you're not allowed to advocate for or admit to yourself you want as an elite experience missing from our lives today (the fantasy of *extreme social exclusion* so only the very pretty, very rich, and very witty girls can join the tea party-- as well as enjoy the courtship dance pre-filtered by only worthy rich/pretty/witty men :) Genre expectations let you relax, they 'hold the space' ideologically. Real life is social chaos of competing norms and suspicion and low trust, that's the price... But I digress
Once they find out Vincent's fraud, next years space program is gonna have to be even more draconian, annoying rules for all coworkers because of him... Maybe all the fellow blue-collars will get fired too.
'we live in a society'
I though about this movie a lot going through IVF with my wife. Particularly when selecting the embryo to implant. For those that don’t know:
With IVF, the doctor harvests as many eggs from the woman as possible. Then after taking the make sample and cleaning, selecting the semen with best modality , fertilize each embryo. Then let the embryo grow for a couple of days then freeze the embryo until it’s ready to be implanted (likely during the woman’s next cycle). If you choose, and generally for a fee, you can have each embryo tested for chromosome mutations.
After the process your doctor will call you and let you know how many eggs were harvested and how many were fertilized. They can then give you a report card for the embryos that represent likelihood of live birth, chromosome evaluation, male/female etc.
You then make a selection of which embryo (s) to insert.
Obviously, given the expense of IVF it’s hard to imagine a scenario of not telling the doctor to pick the highest rated (male or female) embryo just for best chance of success.
Felt very reminiscent of gattaca. And that was just selecting the best that we produced. I can easily see myself saying yes to “The best embryo you have had a chromosome defect that will likely result in condition X, but we can fix the defect with a small gene modification, and give the child the best chance for a healthy life, should we modify the embryo?”
And then the slippery slope, “we can also improve the odds of higher intellect, being taller , thinner, etc”.
I have seen Gattaca (a while ago). But if anything it illustrates the point of view of the guy who has to live with a flawed genome (though in the movie a minor imperfection). Isn't it the point of view of the kid who has to live with his below average genome today?
Gattaca is one of my favorite movies, mainly because of how believable the concept is. Lets say tomorrow they create a commercially available means of ensuring a child is physically and intellectually superior. Once people start availing themselves of this service anyone with the means almost has to do it as well simply as a kindness to their unborn child to ensure they don't end up as a subspecies to the new genetic ubermensch. Society would quickly split into a genetic upper and lower class exactly as displayed in the movie. It would be very hard to consciously condemn your child to the lower class for the entirety of their life if you had the means to do otherwise.
I'm not advocating for this, just describing what I see as the most likely scenario.
Iceland just has a high abortion rate. Selectively terminating births isn't quite the same thing as the genetic engineering and embryo manipulation that was going on in the Gattaca movie. There's even a quote from the movie that specifically addresses this, where that guy says, "you could conceive a million times naturally and never get such a result."
As someone who saw it when it came out, no it was clear at the time that the movie was a classic and also something we would be wrestling with for a long time to come. The genetic temptations were clear, as was thousands of years of wealth and ethnic inequality. Gattaca did a great job of portraying something yet to come.
And we are still just at the beginning of our genocratic journey.
I feel like you're actually getting to the deep, important questions explored in the movie, as you try to explain why it's just a good movie :)
I think the big take-away is that it's not a foregone conclussion that they "always work, always better". The question is should we remove the possibility from those without perfect genetic markers because the odds say so, or give them a chance and evaluate in some other way? Or are the markers both less conclusive than believed and/or less causal? We could find lots of trivial markers that have nothing to do with meaningful outcomes; does the world explored in Gattaca take this to the extreme?
> We do our college admissions by SAT score. If we did them by genetic test for intelligence (Gattaca style), the classes would be mostly the same minus some dumb rich kids.
You have literally no way of rigourously making that claim given our incomplete understanding of genetics and intelligence. In any case, it's completely immaterial to my point as I already acknowledged that our culture discriminates for irrelevant reasons, and this movie is a harsh critique of that practice.
> In the movie, if the genetic enhancements work, then it's basically meritocracy
No, it's the complete opposite. The people who were rewarded didn't actually do anything to earn those rewards, so it's the exact opposite of a meritocracy, it's genetic cronyism, no different than awarding a promotion based on someone's skin colour.
> If they don't work, like you seem to imply in your comment, then it's arbitrary discrimination, which isn't a particularly interesting or unique concept for a movie.
The whole point of the movie is to elevate the notion of meritocracy based on actual achievements, and to criticize discrimination and generalizations based on some nebulous notion of statistical "potential".
A lower-budget production, particularly by an independent studio, will also have far less interference from "producers" who try to justify their salary by giving notes.
Gattaca is from '97, which was right in the middle of a golden era for movies. Independent films took off and even big studios were affected by the shift.
With regards to GP's comment about bad effects, look at the cult classic Event Horizon from the same year. It still holds up in a lot of ways, but there's one laughably bad element: horrible CGI water droplet effects. It was a hot new effect and they shoved it into way too many shots.
That part of the movie actually makes perfect sense to me.
In the real world, the vast majority of people are quick to misinterpret scientific findings to reinforce their own biases. Gattaca is the story of a world where the "Others" in that society are those who are not genetically engineered to culturally acceptable standards.
IMHO it is a very human and believable part of the story that most of society will simply choose to go along with being bigoted against the out group, and not spend the extra time and effort to figure out if their biases are actually correct. In the story, Anton tells Vincent his parents died assuming that he had died young, because the doctors told them he would.
We do our college admissions by SAT score. If we did them by genetic test for intelligence (Gattaca style), the classes would be mostly the same minus some dumb rich kids. And since social class and income is heavily determined by where you go to school, it's a similar situation to Gattaca.
In the movie, if the genetic enhancements work, then it's basically meritocracy, and not that different than what we have today. If they don't work, like you seem to imply in your comment, then it's arbitrary discrimination, which isn't a particularly interesting or unique concept for a movie.
Gattaca is my favorite movie. Brotherly feud, science, genetics, space. I enjoy movies when there’s one theme I can relate to, this movie has four.
The style, human spirit and perseverance are a bonus. I rewatch it when I need to put things and life in perspective.
> We explicitly discriminate by intelligence, which is mostly genetic. How is that different than Gattaca?
We discriminate on intelligence when it's important for the job at hand. The bad kind of discrimination is the kind that considers irrelevant factors.
I agree implicit discrimination based on height and attractiveness exists in our culture. This movie is a searing criticism of exactly that kind of discrimination.
We explicitly discriminate by intelligence, which is mostly genetic. How is that different than Gattaca? One must assume that the genetically enhanced in the movie are actually enhanced after all.
And we implicitly discriminate by height, which shows a strong correlation with income. That one doesn't even have utility like discrimination based on intelligence does.
I found it really hard to relate to any of the characters in the film, to the point where they were barely recognizable as humans.
Does it make sense, in a world like the one in Gattaca, for a person that is part of a discriminated class, to go into space, instead of trying to change the society around him to be less discriminatory?
It seemed to me like the whole effort was a self-motivated, flaccid revenge fantasy that wouldn't make any material difference to the others suffering from discrimination on earth. All of that effort, for what?
Anyway, I didn't hate the film, I just found it bizarre, alien-like.
Despite Gattaca being one of my favorite movies for years I only recently learned, right here on HN, that the cinematographer is Sławomir Idziak, frequent collaborator of Krzysztof Kieślowski, which explains why Gattaca looks so much like one of my other favorites, The Double Life of Veronique.
> create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.
See also: Dark City
Gattaca set the field of biotech back by decades. Cool movie though, that's part of the problem.
"If the audience is supposed to accept that genetic determinism is true in Gattaca, then no amount of Vincent's hard work should make Vincent a hero. He's just a fraud. If the audience is not supposed to believe that in the world of Gattaca genetic determinism is true (that is, it's false), then it should be interpreted as a story of discrimination, and a story of the underdog's heroic hard work overcoming the negative effects of a corrupt, wrong, erroneously-discriminating society."
from http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Gattaca.pdf & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32386006
Besides, Vincent could just purchase a ticket for a rocket ride instead....
He is the subject of the Lord of War movie by Andrew Niccol, who made Truman Show (gaslighting), Gattaca (eugenics), In Time (immortality), Good Kill (drone pilots) and Anon (privacy/hacking).
His film In Time[1] was also pretty decent, though not as good as Gattaca, imo.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time
The movie also did a lot to turn the public against the emerging field of genetic engineering, and science in general. Even 25 years later, people cite GATTACA as a reason to avoid vaccines.
It seems to me that the overwhelming takeaway from that movie was more science is always bad, and leads to suffering and human misery. I think there were some good messages in there, but most people who I have talked to about the movie seem to have missed them, and focus entirely on how we need to outlaw any form of research into human genetics.
This made me look up what Andrew Niccol has been up to since. He had a terrific start to his career, writing and directing Gattaca and also writing The Truman Show.
But since then he seems to have fallen into a slump, directing just a handful of poorly reviewed movies in the span of 26 years. (The exception is Lord of War, which, while not a masterpiece, was quite enjoyable at the time, and has one of the most memorable opening sequences of any movie.)
This also made me think about what people like him do in the time in between. How are they earning a living? Some directors and screenwriters have gaps lasting 5-10 years between each movie they make. Much of the time must be spent trying to get projects off the ground, but who's footing the bill?
I'm going to take the inevitable downvotes and say I wasn't a fan of Gattaca. In particular the story gets muddled for me because they made the poor choice of choosing a space mission as the background for the story.
NASA and the Air Force already have (had) a "you must have perfect genes or you don't get to be an astronaut / fighter pilot" so that part of Gattaca was not sci-fi, it was just repeating what was already true. One of my best friends in high-school, his dream was to be a fighter pilot, but he had bad vision (bad genes) and knew that was an instant "no".
In terms of the movie, the main character wants the government to risk billions of dollars on a space mission on him and he selfishly doesn't care that they're trying to lower the risk of failure by selecting only people less likely to have issues on the mission. Real space missions do the same. You aren't going to send someone who genes suggest the mission may fail. They may not give you a DNA test, but they will test tons of other things that all basically test your things you got because of your genes.
I get the movie is about trying harder than anyone else, taking risks, not letting others tell you your limits. All of that is great. But, because of the poor choice of context (billion dollar space missions) it didn't work for me because that is how billion dollar space missions are run and it made the main character kind of a jerk for risking the mission and every one else's lives.
Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.
> Gattaca’s cinematographer Slawomir Idziak worked with famous director Krzystof Kieslowski and shot some of his most striking films.
Oh wow that’s so obvious now thinking about Gattaca and say The Double Life of Veronique. Thank you for that tidbit.
Gattaca is a good movie. I can't wait to read this. I'd also suggest William Gibson (of neuromancer fame)'s Alien script.
Lots of good suggestions in this thread. Dark City's aesthetic and story-telling style made it one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen. You are in the dark most of the movie, both in aesthetic of the film and metaphorically in the sense that you don't know what is going on, but discover it slowly, and along the way you are lead to reach premature conclusions that turn out later to be false. I haven't watched this movie in years, but it's been permanently seared into the deepest darkest corners of my mind.
Another excellent sci-fi i came across earlier this year, from the late 70's early 80's is a polish film On The Silver Globe. The special effects are nothing more than lighting, photography, writing, costumes, set design, and excellent acting, but I can still say that it's psychadelic in the way it provokes the mind, the senses, and the emotions.
I’d argue it’s man against nature in its rawest form. Many sci fi films try to use this as a plot point (“I know the math, punch it” in Iron man for example), but GATTACA handles it head on - the protagonist battling what’s supposedly his nature given limitations is what I would consider the main if not only quality that makes man “not natural” more so than even any artificial intelligence we may create tomorrow.
Importantly, it’s one of the rarest sci fi films where there’s no “supernatural” element whatsoever- no force, no Q, no monolith. Just man against nature. Only three movies I know doing this are gattaca, Martian and the moon.
Is that really the theme though? Last time I watched it, the theme was "Man with debilitating genetic defect (high risk of sudden heart failure) was denied a chance at piloting a billion-dollar spacecraft. So not an underdog; a selfish person wanting to risk public money and lives, for personal glory.
I never saw the theme the movies is purported to present. I think Gattaca is conflated with other genetic-modification memes because it came out around the time those were current.
If the director wanted the movie to be about a hero, they fumbled it.
> We might find that there are some tasks where having people take on risky enhancements really helps “team humanity.” But certainly wouldn’t want “takes on risky enhancements” to become a trait required to get by.
You may already have heard of it but there's a movie called "Gattaca"[0] that questions a world where genetic enhancements have become effectively mandatory.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
Yes, you can scale the offense up to the point where most would answer yes to allowing this.
It’s interesting that in the past I wouldn’t have been extremely worried about it. But times have changed. Asking for consent is now considered old-fashioned. Law enforcement has been taking every technological shortcut offered as soon as it is in budget.
It’s a dangerous time we’re heading into. Well, already arrived in. Big brother panopticon is a reality. In this environment I see the precedent in a new light. Reminds me of the movie Gattaca, which is not a feel-good film.
Oh I do. Gattaca is my favorite film of all time that I rewatch every other year.
I was merely being tongue in cheek about the modern reality of class inequality.
Genetically superior humans are a net benefit to all of humanity. Inevitably they will interbreed with arbitrary other people occasionally and the technological advances also benefit everyone. Yes, it will stratify society - all of society is and has always been stratified. It is not a good indicator to inform whether or not you should do something.
> It's crazy to me that we're already approaching Gattaca, and the discussion does not revolve entirely on how to prevent it.
Because the movie has been engineered specifically to make you feel vindicated: Someone is said to be limited, they then overcome this limitation. It is the "american dream" in movie form. Another poster has said it higher up: If genetic determinism is real, the main character is a fraud. Viewed through that lens, it becomes an entirely different movie.
[Gattaca](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/) is about the long term consequences of this exact technology for society.
In particular, the consequences for the children born naturally who don't benefit from this tech. They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners... an underclass of society.
Gattaca is a great movie exploring this very topic. I love the name of the movie too (get it?)
Interesting that it’s an article about Carl Sagans SciFi side and it doesn’t mention that he’s the one who suggested the aliens in 2001 be just a big monolith without form. Also arguably a better sci-fi film (and more cerebral?) than Contact.
I love Contact myself but it was clearly not exceptional. I’d rate it comparably to 2010, 2001’s sequel.
For me it’s banalaity arises from its following of the one sci-fi trope that always disappoints me - the existence of an unexplained force/alien/species/molecule that transcends known physics as the main plot point. Pretty much every sci-fi show movie novel has this component and I’m just tired. The only two movies I know that don’t have it are the Martian and Gattaca. Those are the exceptional sci-fi works if you ask me.
PS: please don’t mention the moon, I hope we can keep the discussion to sci-fi works that are logically consistent at the least.
Ridley Scott isn't a director that just does contemplative movies all the time. A lot of his stuff flat out just average (Prometheus for example) and he even does raw action blockbusters like gladiator that are very far away from being as thematically engaging as BR.
If ridley scott did Gattaca, there'd definitely be more of a budget on the sci-fi setting. It'd be more grounded and gritty with less of an 80s aesthetic.
As for whether it'd be as good as Andrew Niccols' version well... that's hard to say given Scotts hit or miss track record.
Nothing against Andrew Niccol, who wrote and directed Gattaca, but the same film with the same actors, directed by Ridley Scott, is really something to contemplate.
Most of Gattaca is shot indoors and the sets have a very minimalist aesthetic. It looks futuristic, but since their budget was quite low* it was also a way to keep costs down. The visuals bear no comparison at all to Blade Runner. It's an incredible movie nevertheless.
* I quite enjoyed how astronauts wear a suit and tie even on spaceship launches. Out-of-universe that was probably because they didn't have the budget for spacesuit costumes. But in-universe it is still legitimately a "space suit" and might be a nod to how formal the Gattacca workplace setting is (I've read too much r/moviedetails).
Blade runner isn't even that good, thematically. But I get why it's considered the best.
It's because in most sci-fi movies a lot of effort is spent on the setting and thus the story while many times is good, often lacks the depth of their non-fiction counter-parts.
Bladerunner is one of the few movies that has blockbuster level visuals while maintaining a very serious story with a lot of depth. Gattaca is another sci-fi movie that achieves this as well, though the visuals in Gattaca aren't blockbuster level.
> parents matter, but they don’t make a difference
This can clearly be refuted by the following argument:
1. Human nature has changed little over the past 10000 years
2. The capability of individuals has improved massively over the past 10000 years
3. Any improvement in capability must be due to environmental changes over the past 10000 years(nurture) as nature has not changed
4. Parents are responsible for a large part of your environment
I don't see how this nature vs nurture debate ever became a thing. Smells like leftover thinking from racism or something. IMO the only debate should be around which aspects of the nurture environment are the most important.
One more note to add: Interestingly, in homogeneous/"equal" environments, each individual is given effectively equal opportunity and environment - which will mean that the smaller nature-based differences will start to matter. So from a certain perspective, the more we fight for equal "competitive footing" in winner-take-all situations, the more will see nature-based properties mattering more, which comes with a whole whack of other problems (see the film GATTACA).
> I have seen Gattaca and don't find human genetic engineering to be horrific. It's cool and exciting that people will be able to have better children than they would have otherwise.
Did you even pay attention to the movie? The horrific aspect was the human genetic engineering led 1) to the the unengineered to be turned into an underclass that was blatantly and unfairly discriminated against, and 2) that same discrimination would be turned against the engineered if they had an accident that caused them to fall short of the expected perfection.
I have little doubt that the reality of genetic engineering (that was is effective as that depicted) would rhyme with that movie. It's also nearly certain that any such technology would not be distributed in an egalitarian way, so the sentiment should be more like "it's cool and exciting that [well off] people will be able to have [genetically superior] children than [the plebs]."
Personally I find Gattaca’s aesthetic stunning. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, it’s niche, but I love it.
The hero however doesn’t necessarily have a heart condition, I think it’s only ever stated that he has a risk of one. The whole film is about how risk has been weeded out of the culture in certain ways because some people can “not have a risk”, except of course this is disproven by Jude Law’s character.
Weaker arguments, but the space industry is multiple launches per day from the Gattaca facility, so we can assume that they are much more flexible on astronaut selection. Also I’m not sure it’s said that it’s a public organisation. Again, minor details, but I didn’t take away from it what you seem to have. Everyone entitled to their interpretation though!
I'm confused by Gattaca. Not a great-looking film to start with. And then some theme about genetic analysis preventing people from getting jobs. The 'hero' wants to be an astronaut but has a heart condition. Which even today will get you dropped from astronaut training.
But no! He cheats and takes somebody else's spot and risks a billion dollar mission. So he can have his dream.
It's not the anthem movie about genetic rights it claims to be. Its a strange story about a cheat who risks public money for selfish goals. Or so it seems to me.
They missed Gattaca [1], one of my favorites.
It's also weird that "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is part of the sci-fi genre, kind of odd as it's mostly focused on the romance.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
I thought the same before reading the article.
After reading it I feel like Gattaca barely scratched the surface. It was actually a pretty tame movie.
Some of the points made by the author are far scarier: gene editing startups with VC funding and sociopathic founders or amoral autocratic governments (think N.Korea, Russia, etc)
The film Gattaca (1997) speaks to this better than I can.
I for one very much hope we don't get to a Gattaca-style society! That movie doesn't leave me with a particularly positive view of such a system, but maybe that's just me.
But opposite is true now - state is getting data from private enterprise.
Yes I watched Gattaca not really long ago, based on some HN or Twitter FUD. Pretty stupid movie.
This is a genuine question, and I apologize in advance if this ever comes across as ableist. Would you still have taken the job knowing that your vision issues might (hypothetically) endanger yourself and others in the line of work?
This is the question I have been asking since I watched the movie GATTACA. Without spoiling it for anybody who has not seen it, the movie depicts a predicament somewhat similar to your situation. In the end, the hero was able to emerge triumphant and achieve his life goal through plenty of perseverance plus some deception on the side. The film is hailed as seminal critique against ableism and eugenics among other things. However I could never shake the feeling that the story put the hero in a position way above his physical capability and it is very likely going to end in disaster for everyone involved. I really want to agree with the message of the film, but the plot only seems to undermine it.
In a more relatable example, is there any justification in revoking drivers license for senior citizens on the basis that they much more likely to cause accidents, whilst knowing that their quality of life will suffer greatly as a result? This question affects me personally in some way and I still have no good answer for it.
Gattaca shows a society in which eugenics, in hopes of creating a shortcut for people who have supposedly the better genes, devolved into a society where someone who did not have genetic augmentation could outcompete a whole bunch of genetically augmented people.
In the movie, either the genetic augmentation didn't work (as well) as expected, or their advantage caused the augmented people to become lazy because they got covered in undeserved status no matter how little or much they worked, as everything depended on which genes they have been "bred" for. Then someone with supposedly bad genes could run circles around them just by working hard.
Maybe some mixture, e.g. in order to protect those kids who fail at the task they have been "bred" for from considering themselves failed humans, gattaca's society adopted this model where they shower all kids in status who have the right genes. Maybe it's not the kids who are being protected but the companies selling the augmentations.
> We're comparing the typical outcome of a pair of parents with the best possible child those parents could have.
I'm still not sure I agree with this. There's huge variability between the reproductive fitness of siblings, even excluding genetic illnesses and deformities. Might be intelligence, body type, attractiveness, etc.
The real problem I see is that qualifying the "best" traits might be impossible, because what's best is highly subjective to the environment and the environment that we all live in is constantly shifting and seems to be doing so at an accelerating rate.
The film Gattaca actually gives an interesting take on how this drive for "best" might play out. Those born into the privilege of having the "best traits" a) don't feel as strong of a need to struggle and overcome adversity, b) dismiss people who are "lesser" than they are, and end up surprised and unable to compete when they fall behind, and c) people who are "lesser" are filled with motivation and drive to prove themselves. I could even see some parents intentionally giving their child a minor disability to give them an edge over their "perfect" peers who all flit their lives away thinking everything will be handed to them on silver platter. Similar to how some parents are starting to realize how damaging massive trust funds and inheritances can be to people that receive them.
> people like people
Yes, and it's so profitable that someone will inevitably try to use AI-animated "people" to harvest market demand for organic people. Similar to cloning popular software or movies with lower-rent talent. Andrew Niccol, creator of Truman Show, Lord of War, Gattaca and Lord of War, made a film called Simone about a computer-generated fashion/celebrity avatar. Some of the dynamics in that film have already been seen on social media and will likely expand in future metaverses.
"Gattaca" the movie is here.
Things like this make me think of the movie Gattaca. Mild Spoilers After the murder, they just go around vacuuming up any and all organic material to test for DNA. They get a hit from someone who “isn’t supposed to be there” and immediately focus the entire investigation on that person. It fits the very real pattern of using science to just confirm the human biases held by the people using it. If police can sweep up and search through a mountain of data, it is going to be the Muslim immigrant hit they focus on over the white middle manager. It will be the person struggling off and on with homelessness that gets arrested because they matched a pattern and didn’t have an alibi, over the suburban mom.
That if you give police a list of random correlations, they will focus on “those people” that are assumed to be more criminal and usually have less means and ability to fight back.
Gattaca is a thought provoking movie exploring this very concept
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
In my experience nobody fretted about grades and minor grading issues more than the folks who had high marks.
The burden of perfection (or close to it) is pretty brutal.
Among other topics the film Gattaca seemed to address that issue.
It seems like every movie I found entertaining but a stretch in the 90s is becoming reality:
* Demolition Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)
* Enemy of the State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
* Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
* The Net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(1995_film)
Yeah, Arrival fits well and I enjoyed it. There are a number of lower budget films you could add to that list like Primer, Moon (2009), or Gattaca. Ex Machina is sci-fi + drama. I'm sure there's plenty more. There's just a tendency for sci-fi films to lean heavily into action (or occasionally horror) like The Martian film did when compared with the book.
Jurassic Park feels more action/horror focused to me, but it has a sci-fi premise.
Thinking of the film "Gattaca" (albeit it was about the opposite of reducing the impact of genetics).
The problem occurs when someone thinks they can determine “best” from traits that probably don’t actually matter in space, like being shorter than average or having uneven legs.
I found the movie Gattaca to be a surprisingly good argument for this position despite being fiction and entertainment first and foremost.
>Not as far as it looks.
People vastly overestimate our understanding and ability to produce reliable phenotypic changes. Being able to change the tiny percent of diseases that have a straightforward and simple genetic connection is a far cry from designer humans. I think Richard Dawkins said it well.
> “Think of the body as a blanket, suspended from the ceiling by 100,000 rubber bands, all tangled and twisted around one another. The shape of the blanket — the body — is determined by the tensions of all these rubber bands taken together. Some of the rubber bands represent genes, others environmental factors. A change in a particular gene corresponds to a lengthening or shortening of one particular rubber band. But any one rubber band is linked to the blanket only indirectly via countless connections amid the welter of other rubber bands. If you cut one rubber band, or tighten it, there will be a distributed shift in tensions, and the effect on the shape of the blanket will be complex and hard to predict. In the same way, possession of a particular gene need not infallibly dictate that an individual will be homosexual. Far more probably the causal influence will be statistical. The effect of genes on bodies and behaviour is like the effect of cigarette smoke on lungs. If you smoke heavily, you increase the statistical odds that you'll get lung cancer. You won't infallibly give yourself lung cancer. Nor does refraining from smoking protect you infallibly from cancer. We live in a statistical world.”
>Cheering for science advancements that are far out of reach for the majority leaves a bitter taste.
Yet a random child born in the slums of Mumbai has a higher life expectancy than the wealthiest people on earth did 100 years ago. Just because the rich have it better than everyone else does not mean that scientific advancement has not led to vastly improved lives all over the world. Yeah, people are still greedy and mean and blah blah, but with 2 extra decades of life to live on average.
>BTW, Gattaca is a temporary time. Once it's passed - one whole generation, so say ~80 years - that world would be wonderful, but that limbo time, when the movie plays out, is the nasty part.
I don’t think you understand the point of the movie. The movie was about how we shouldn’t put total and complete faith in gene editing, because our genes are not the only thing that make us “us”. Jude Law is a genetic phenom but ends up not doing anything with his life of note because of his decisions, bad luck, and his lack of drive and motivation. Ethan Hawk was written off as a loser before he was a day old because of his genes, but he succeeded due to his decisions, good luck, and his drive and motivation. His genes said he had a statistically super high chance of dying because of his heart, but he didn’t, because a statistical likelihood is not a certainty. Ethan Hawk is allowed on the shuttle by the doctor, who’s genetically enhanced son is “not all he would have hoped”.
The message of the movie is that we need to be careful of using genes as a proxy for everything that makes up a person, and how that could lead to a dystopian society where people are pigeon holed based on one thing about them. That taking the shortcut of using a proxy, even one as complex as our genes, for something as complex as “human potential” is folly. The statistical nature of genes, epigenetics, and environmental factors cannot be ignored.
> Helping people with severe diseases is still far away from creating the perfect humans.
Not as far as it looks. Honestly, it looks closer, than real self driving cars.
> You turning this positive into a negative is distasteful.
I'm incredibly happy that we, as humanity, are advancing with science - the mRNA vaccines are also incredible. The part that is not incredible is that we, as society, are in most cases still behave like we did in the stone age: greedy, selfish, narcissistic. Because of this tech that should be used to help those in need is most commonly used to "help" those with enough funds or means.
Cheering for science advancements that are far out of reach for the majority leaves a bitter taste.
EDIT BTW, Gattaca is a temporary time. Once it's passed - one whole generation, so say ~80 years - that world would be wonderful, but that limbo time, when the movie plays out, is the nasty part.
Three movies for freedom lovers:
* Logan's Run ... It really is safe outside
* Demolition Man ... "You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read."
* Gattaca ... "I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science."
The movie GATTACA comes to mind which, while fictional raises some interesting ethical questions.
No, they make a good point. If you restrict your focus to countries where higher education is expensive, it definitely is one of many ways in which parental wealth translates into an advantage for offspring. To say it's free or cheap in some countries is just missing their point.
There are also ways in which parental wealth is a disadvantage. It can weaken that grit, ambition, and drive to accomplish things.
While I worry about the implications as much as you do (Gattaca was a great, thought provoking movie) I think the grandparent comment is completely correct that there may be no way to prevent it. If we outlaw it our country, other countries may not. It only takes one group from now until the end of the human race to pursue this for that bifurcation of the human race to be possible.
Maybe it's not such a bad thing. If we don't make ourselves better, whatever the cost, we may find ourselves replaced by artificial life one day.
Your attempt at whataboutism failed.
It is not at all equivalent. In developed countries, education is accessible to most or all. (The USA is not a developed country by this measure)
If you aren't worried about humanity splitting into multiple species along economic lines, I don't know what to tell you. I guess the film Gattaca was just a fun romp for you? I guess you must assume you will be one of the "haves" and to hell with everyone else, if you get yours?
When you refer to Gattaca: it doesn't reflect our society very well.
While i like that movie very much, he still got on a spaceship having much worse physical abilities than all the others of his crew.
Also in this specific topic, i'm not talking about a human who is able to overcome most/all of his obstacles given at birth. I'm talking about me and all other humans who are not able to do so.
I would also argue that on an ethical level, you would require to make sure that every new human being has the best chance our society can provide for him/her. Like if technology is so far advanced, that you can just scan an embryo, you see why it would become much smaller or way too tall which would lead to medical issues and you could fix it with a press of a button, you would need to do it.
I would argue that not doing this, is the same thing as denying a preterm baby an incubator.
This reveals a lot about how technical people approach problems. Many times you're simply applying whole sum logic to a human and not considering that humans are soft and squishy.
What happens when those 100 humans perfect for the task get sick? Maybe have children? What about life altering events or accidents? Divorce? Theft? Emotion? Government oversight or over reach? There are a million things that can whittle or impede that 100 people. Much like the film Gattaca who felt they had the perfect vision for who was perfect, life tends to disagree. In the 50's we all thought India was a backwater of poverty yet its yielding some of the worlds best problem solvers.
These are all things that make it better for as many people as possible to focus on a problem and eventually we reach a better solution. It also fosters creative destruction as there're always new cultural takes on an issue that evolves over time. Was the vacuum cleaner solved when Electrolux was the dominate force? Or is it solved by Dysan? This is part of the fabric of life which makes debate so interesting.
Gattaca is one of my favorite movies
Movies with great impact on me:
1. Untouchable - must see
2. Gattaca - are we going there?
3. 1984 - must see
4. Idiocracy - initially looks like joke/stupid movie, but it's more real then we may want to agree
5. Life of others (made in Ge)
6. Amelie Poulain (made in Fr)
7. Turtles can fly (made in Ir)
8. Stalker - the russian original (3 parts) (made in Ru)
9. Metropolis
Other good movies:
Lost Horizon
The Bucket List
The Truman Show
Solaris 1972
Enemy at the Gates
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Tips for good movies in general: take countries one by one and search best ever movies from that country.
It’s like that film Gattaca is becoming reality
Often we use stories to draw parallels. If you watch a movie or read a book and think "that's not a precise depiction of the issue!" I don't think anyone is going to disagree with you. I think you are failing to see similarities and are focusing on the differences. The differences are there for entertainment. I mean... come on... we don't even believe that humans have psychic abilities/magic. But that doesn't mean that it can't be a compelling and worthwhile story. Even Gattaca, which is much more scientifically reasonable, has many shortfalls and exaggerates things to tell a better story.
There's numbers between 0% and 100%. I'm not claiming Minority Report is 100% reality (that's ludicrous!), but that doesn't mean it is 0%.
Take your trolling elsewhere.
Reminds me of that access control system in the movie Gattaca, where you had to give a blood sample ;-)
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ac/aa/b0/acaab01e6647159309f6808443314ffb--film-culte-ethan-hawke.jpg
> Do you have anything else that points to this? I've watched Gattaca 5-6 times I reckon, and never picked up on a hint that Vincent dies.
Other than what I wrote, I can't think of anything else.
> For the heart beats, I've always interpreted it as the world won't give him a chance because _statistically_ he has a low likelihood of success compared to the "guaranteed" success of genetic engineering.
Same. I used to believe it. Now I don't. Sure. It's statistics. But there are actual physical limits and performance. Even though Vincent surpassed the time expectations of his heart ( which was a ball park figure with a margin of error ), he can't surpass the physical limits. He can't run without his heart nearly exploding. That's why he has to cheat. He needs record Jerome's heartbeat. Those tests are to ensure that the astronauts can survive months/years of space travel to Titan and to thrive in Titan. Vincent, at least his heart, can't perform.
Gattaca is a society with unfair genetic discrimination and also fair performance tests. Vincent could be praised for overcoming the unfair discrimination, but he should also be criticized for cheating fair performance tests.
If a legally blind person wanted to drive and cheated his way to a driver's license. Would you cheer him as he sits down on the driver's seat? Of course not.
> As for the "never saving anything for the way back" theme, I've always interpreted that as a part of this too. The idea that statistics aren't everything, going for the "guaranteed" outcome might limit your upside, etc.
Same. I used to believe it. Now I don't. Now I interpret it as someone who has a major inferiority complex and a huge chip on his shoulder that's willing to die rather than lose. Not only is he willing to commit suicide than lose, he's willing to kill his own brother in the process. If you think about what the swim contest was about, it's about Vincent's willingness to kill himself and his own brother. That's why in the second race, when Vincent tells his brother, his brother looks at him in absolute horror and turns back.
Vincent is all too human. The unfairness of society and his lot in life has made him willing to cheat, die and kill to get what he wants and screw over society.
> I'm pretty sure that "going home" isn't a reference to death. In the context of the few lines it's in, he's talking about how maybe he's not leaving because the atoms in our bodies come from stars.
"Leaving this world". "Going home". Returning to the atoms from whence we come from. Like ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
> Finally, for me, there are too many references in Vincent's relationship with Irene that show an intent to return and an expectation that he will.
He left his parents/brothers for good and he loved them. He also left Jerome to his death. Not sure Irene is that much more special. Vincent has shown that people means less to him than his goal. Besides, didn't the flight window between earth and titan open every 77 years or so? Besides vincent doesn't save anything for the trip back.
> The gift of all the samples from Eugene, enough to last a lifetime, backs up this idea.
Last "two" ( jerome's and vincent's ) lifetimes. Do you really think Jerome was able to produce that much blood, urine and skin/hair samples for two lifetimes? The last part of the film, both jerome and vincent were trying their best to avoid the elephant in the room ( their impending deaths ). That dinner scene, vincent asks jerome what he'll do after he leaves for titan. There is an awkward silence followed by silly response from jerome. And then Jerome toasts on his life on titan and asks what titan is like. But Jerome knows vincent is never going to reach titan alive and Vincent knows Jerome isn't going to last long after he leaves.
Besides, if Vincent intended to reach Titan and come back, he'd bring a few samples with him. Samples for id check on titan and of course id check when he arrives back on earth. If they check ids on the way to titan, don't you think there will be id checks on the way back or at least at the destination when he gets off the spaceship? But then again, he doesn't save anything for the trip back. His actions and his last statement makes me believe that he is not too long for this world.
> But every other point has nothing to do with statistics or scientific analysis. I really can't say definitively that he died on his way to titan, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming. It wouldn't have been hinted at so much in the movie and the movie would not have ended with that quote otherwise.
Do you have anything else that points to this? I've watched Gattaca 5-6 times I reckon, and never picked up on a hint that Vincent dies.
For the heart beats, I've always interpreted it as the world won't give him a chance because _statistically_ he has a low likelihood of success compared to the "guaranteed" success of genetic engineering. To me Vincent and Eugene are a rejection of this – showing that humans aren't just statistics, and that the guarantees are no such thing.
As for the "never saving anything for the way back" theme, I've always interpreted that as a part of this too. The idea that statistics aren't everything, going for the "guaranteed" outcome might limit your upside, etc.
I'm pretty sure that "going home" isn't a reference to death. In the context of the few lines it's in, he's talking about how maybe he's not leaving because the atoms in our bodies come from stars.
Finally, for me, there are too many references in Vincent's relationship with Irene that show an intent to return and an expectation that he will. Being gone for a year and that being "just one trip around the sun", lead the audience to see his trip as bittersweet because he's achieved his goal but will have to leave Irene temporarily, but ultimately a positive ending for him as he embarks on a new stage in his life. The gift of all the samples from Eugene, enough to last a lifetime, backs up this idea.
> I interpreted all of the things you listed as indications that statistics and scientific analysis have limitations and can't predict success or failure, not as indications that he would fail and die in the end.
I did so for the "heart beats". But every other point has nothing to do with statistics or scientific analysis. I really can't say definitively that he died on his way to titan, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming. It wouldn't have been hinted at so much in the movie and the movie would not have ended with that quote otherwise.
> And again, a major theme of the story is that the two men are more capable of achieving great things together than apart.
That's a bit of a reach but you are entitled to the view.
> You seem to have a thesis that the film is a tragedy and are working backwards from there.
No. I watched Gattaca as a kid and loved it and saw it as an inspirational movie. Everything you believed, I believed. Then I got older and watched the movie a few more times. My thesis changed from inspirational to tragedy. As I said, my view of the movie changed. And I love the movie more now because it is richer, deeper and more consequential than a good simplistic feel good inspirational movie.
> And remember that neither Vincent nor Eugene (Jerome) were in a good place prior to meeting each other.
They weren't in a good place at the end either.
Anyways, you are entitled to your view. I used to view it like you and I suspect it's most people's first impressions when they first watch the movie. But after repeated viewing, it's hard to watch someone burning himself to death and a man's looking into space and "going home" as inspirational. There are inspirational aspects to the film, but I don't think that's what the movie is really about. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
> Vincent definitely doesn't die on his way to Titan. I'm not sure where you got that from.
It's alluded to a few times in the movie. Vincent never saves anything for the swim back. Vincent specifically mentions that he is living on borrowed time as he has surpassed the "number of beats expected of his heart". And there is the treadmill scene where he was barely able to hang on. Remember that the training was to select people who can physically survive the journey and thrive on titan. Not to mention Vincent doesn't bring any of Jerome's urine,blood,etc with him to Titan. Do you really believe they don't check your identification on titan? Also, the lock of hair that Jerome gave to Vincent is an acknowledgment of Vincent that Jerome isn't going to make it and of course that Vincent isn't going to make it either. Finally, the last words of Vincent: "For someone who was never meant for this world, I must confess, I'm suddenly having a hard time leaving it. Of course, they say every atom in our bodies was once a part of a star. Maybe I'm not leaving; maybe I'm going home."
> Jerome also self-immolates because he realizes that his purpose is now completed, not because he is cynical and depressed.
That's a very upbeat view. But people don't normally celebrate fulfilling their purpose by burning themselves to death. Some believe that Vincent's death symbolizes going to heaven since he overachieved and Jerome's death is hell ( burning ) because he underachieved.
> Vincent through achieving his goal of becoming an astronaut and Jerome through providing his identity and biological material for a greater purpose.
But there's the rub, Vincent didn't become an astronaut, "Jerome" did. Even when Vincent succeeded, he didn't.
> "I got the better end of the deal. I only lent you my body - you lent me your dream."
Yes. And neither achieved their dream and both died at the end. And Jerome also left enough blood,urine,etc for two lifetimes... Think about what that really means.
I used to view Gattaca as you did. It was inspirational like Rudy. But then I watched it more and started noticing more aspects of the movie and it is far deeper and far more tragic than a generic inspirational movie. It's a tragedy.
> 1. The film Gattaca (1999), in addition to being an excellent, inspiring film all around, centers on an aspiring astronaut's upcoming trip to Titan. Highly recommended.
Gattaca is one of my favorite films. I agree that it is excellent, but I'm not sure it is inspiring. Gattaca is about how the system, society, circumstances and expectations beyond your control are an albatross around everyone's neck and ultimately harm and defeat the individual. In Gattaca, both Vincent and Jerome are tragic figures as they are both victims of expectations. Jerome is burdened by high expectations and Vincent by low expectations and those societal expectations are a hurdle to the lives they want to lead. Ultimately those societal expectations crushes Jerome and turns him into a cynical cripple. Vincent's societal expectations places a chip on his shoulder which costs him his family and his identity. And in the end, neither Jerome nor Vincent achieve their dreams as Jerome burns himself to death and Vincent dies on his way to Titan due to his "degenerate" heart. In a way, Gattaca is about two people on their own suicide mission as they rage against society/expectations. If you watch the movie from the beginning, you'll realize that both fully know that they are going to die/kill themselves doing what they are doing. It's a tragedy.
Two thoughts on this topic:
1. The film Gattaca (1997), in addition to being an excellent, inspiring film all around, centers on an aspiring astronaut's upcoming trip to Titan. Highly recommended.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZa83dTf4JA
2. The colonization of Venus is also a fascinating idea that isn't talked about much in comparison to the Moon or Mars. Essentially, the surface is too hot for colonization, but it may be possible to build floating cities ±31 miles above the surface.
- Venus's atmosphere is made mostly out of carbon dioxide. Because nitrogen and oxygen are lighter than carbon-dioxide, breathable-air-filled balloons will float at a height of about 50 km (31 mi). At this height, the temperature is a manageable 75 °C (348 K; 167 °F); or 27 °C (300 K; 81 °F) if we could get 5 km (3.1 mi) higher
- The atmosphere also provides the various elements required for human life and agriculture: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur.
- Additionally, the upper atmosphere could provide protection from harmful solar radiation comparable to the protection provided by Earth's atmosphere. The Atmosphere of Mars, as well as the Moon provide little such protection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus
Amadeus is a movie that really resonated for the reasons you mention. However, another movie that really resonated, and offers a counterpoint to you’re-either-born-with-it-or-not fatalism is Gattaca.
(Of course, one could argue that Amadeus is a “true story”, whereas Gattaca is science fiction.)
The movie Gattaca showed in detail how routine spoofing of a variety of IRL DNA samples could work.
These articles always remind me of the movie GATTACA. Released in 1997. Classic exploration of engineered perfection and raw human will.
The film Gattaca explores some of these themes.
I'm reminded of the movie GATTACA.
But I'm also wondering, shouldn't the parents be testing themselves to see if they have the requisite genes to create a prodigy?
I love talking about this film because you can argue its theme really either way. There's the standard "you can't gene edit heart" or whatever: hard work means more than what you're told you can be at birth.
However -
The story of the film tells us time and time again that Vincent -isn't- able to compete and measure up to the standards needed for space travel. He fails his cardio tests, he can't see well enough to cross the street. But his vanity and pride causes him to cheat the system to make it seem like he passes all the tests. He has the heart of a fighter figuratively but not literally and I always imagined after the end of the movie that his actual faults would come to light and it would cost someone their lives in space.
What if he lost a contact lens in space? They don't have more. What if there was an emergency and they needed someone with an expected amount of endurance to help save everyone? Gattaca for me always told a different, darker story. I think the story they wanted was a caste story - if he was just as able and strong but beat out the genetically superior people on their terms then that would have been the story they were trying to tell. In the end, they told the story of a clever cheater who put his own wants above those in a delicate mission and it's left to a guess if that cost lives or no.
During a talk with another person on this, he supposed that this is why Jerome incinerates himself at the end. He needed a lowly sort as such as Vincent to fulfill his own dream, and in the end just could not reconcile how he may have just destroyed and polluted the whole of his pure society for his own selfish reasons.
Well, whenever I have a heart trouble it (the trouble) normally stops on itself soon. But some times it takes so long that it starts feeling scary.
I often get the trouble during regular sex with no drugs. But this never ever happened during sex on MDMA. The rhythm is so perfect it reminds me of the Gattaca movie.
Some times I had the tachicardia episodes right before taking MDMA because I sort of get nervous (positively, like when you are about to meet a friend you have been separated from for years, because I look forward to such an intense love experience) but they stopped and perfect rhythm restored immediately as MDMA started to act (as I could notice).
So I feel like I should probably carry a reasonably small crystal of MDMA with me wherever I go as it can save my life once - this probably outweighs the risk of criminal prosecution. But I still am not sure, I still hesitate to have any prohibited substances with me, store them at home or anywhere.
I have also tried 6APB once - a guy has told me it's a "better MDMA" which doesn't stress the body that much. Besides I didn't really like it I have also found out (I wouldn't ever touch a drug without studying whatever information I can find about it) it is supposed to be 50 times more cardiotoxic and should never be taken together with viagra - combining these 2 drugs can make you need heart surgery after just a couple of times you take it.
Hell, pre-screening as a concept was taught to me in a biology class 10+ years ago with one example being (some) Jewish communities implementing genetic counseling as a pre-screen before marriage to avoid unwell offspring, e.g. Tay-Sachs. Organizations[0] exist for this purpose already.
The ethics of this as a situation was taught by watching and discussing Gattaca, a movie from 1997.
Certainly not a new idea nor concern. It is a reality, though not quite widespread. Perhaps we will open new societal cans of worm through mass-market, rapid screening. As I write this, somewhat reminds me of the internet.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim
What’s Titan look like this time of year?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lZa83dTf4JA
Exciting to see reality (almost) following fiction. Gattaca is an excellent film, if you haven’t seen it.
The premise of the film Gattaca (1997) is slowly coming true.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
Which is kinda the plot of the movie Gattaca, where the main character is stuck in low-paying grunt jobs for this reason until he goes to extreme lengths to fake his DNA to get the job he really wants (and is otherwise completely capable of performing well).
Gattaca is not a documentary
I watched Gattaca and drew the opposite conclusion. The film defends science through by walking us through the consequences of clinging to the superstition of our ancestors. Being genetically inferior does not wipe away the human drives to belong and achieve. The life of those less fortunate is harder and it is dishonest to pretend that everyone has an equally fantastic life. The main character suffers because of the careless choice his parents made. Even though his parents change their views and recant with their second child, the protagonist remains left behind.
In the world of Gattaca we see that only a few religious nut jobs inflict natural conception on their children. They are called god-born because they are the product of religious extremists. Genetic engineering is common and accessible to all classes. For example portable genetic testing services so ubiquitous that they are available at company party.
As viewers, we should take away what I means to choose to cripple another human permanently. You should think long and hard about winning Jesus points for a second life by consigning a real person with the same ability to feel and dream to Hell in this life.
Gattaca is a favorite of mine, but I've always thought of it more as a utopian film than a dystopian one.
I don't think that we're prepared at all for how much, and from how little, machine learning might be able to deduce about us. Combined with how our behavior is tracked in high resolution by Facebook, Google, and the rest, we're heading straight for the kind of future depicted in films like Gattaca, but they won't even need to test your DNA for it. Just upload a short video of your friend/employee/kid to videotherapist.ai and find out if they're more likely to be an arsonist or a physicist!
I'd disagree. If anything, Gattaca was a movie that shows that naive ideas of "that buddy was screened at birth and deemed a failure" are bullshit.
If anything, I have a feeling that modern hiring goes in exactly the opposite direction, trying to de-bias the process.
so you're suggesting that the authors definition is to narrow or unrepresentative?
Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story.
If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name?
I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy, and it is a blatant myth.
How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?
The movie Gattaca covers this concept quite directly - I think ironically because it frames the problem as one the individuals involved had no original say in.
I wonder if a new version, new advancement would be a terror for everyone else. They'd drop a social step, can't do things, less needed, etc.
The movie Gattaca explored this a bit. People in the film are heavily defined by their engineering. They might not BE just engineered, but being superior, or inferior is all encompassing. It becomes all they are.
In the film it is a bit of a curse even for the best. Jerome failed (got a silver medal) at something and can't recover. His medal only turns to gold at the very end.
I recently watched the film GATTACA. I was shocked by how appropriate it was for our time.
In the film, discrimination by genetics is, strictly speaking, against the law, but a matter of course because of how easy it is to get a sample and sequence someone. Humans are judged based on what's in their genes, not who they are.
The synthetic, designed humans are classified as "valid", while those born naturally are "invalids" or "de-gene-erates".
It would be quite easy for people of all walks of life to become second-class citizens due to information in their genomes if things do not change quickly.
The problem in Gattaca world is not the genetic modification. It is the assumption that worth of the individual can be judged by genetics alone, that fitness for the job can be determined by something other than merit.
In this way Gattaca is a really harmful movie, it decives viewers into thinking that genetic editing is bad, but in fact shows only failures of a non-free society, which is bad independantly from any technology.
Check out the movie Gattaca for a vision of a future world with silent electric cars.
Scott Alexander wrote a short-story sequel to GATTACA on his blog SlateStarCodex this past summer that dealt with epigenetics and education that he called the GATTACA trilogy: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/19/the-gattaca-trilogy/
> “Well, you know how things are. We want to make sure we get only the healthiest, most on-point individuals for our program. We used to do genetic testing, make sure that people’s DNA was pre-selected for success. But after the incident with the Gattaca Corporation and that movie they made about the whole thing, public opinion just wasn’t on board, and Congress nixed the whole enterprise. Things were really touch-and-go for a while, but then we came up with a suitably non-invasive replacement. Epigenetics!”
I absolutely loved the film and thought it was an incredible piece of art and a piercingly realistic depiction of a certain VERY REAL type of masculinity. You're lucky that you find it unbelievable / overdramatic.
Anyway, when I was a kid I used to love seeing those burnt capsules in the Science Museum in London. So crazy to see the story rendered to beautifully, along with the politics, the oxygen fires, the bouncing off the atmosphere... I couldn't have asked for anything more.
I thought his portrayal was a realistic vision of the pitfalls of masculinity, and not melodramatic at all. My dad's like that, except he smiles instead of having the blank Gosling face. My dad didn't cry even at his own mother's funeral.
Seeing Gosling/Armstrong closing up the notebooks where he'd been trying to figure out how to cure his daughter's brain cancer, seeing him cover his face to cry silently, seeing him snap at his friend "Do you think I left there because I wanted to talk?", his fear of his emotions... It was just so true to life. I cried multiple times in that film. Of course films are always a bit romanticised - I have to say at no point was the illusion broken for me.
I think that film gets into my top 3 films along with Gattaca and The Matrix.
I love Drive but it was really Blade Runner 2049 that made me realise that his "silent" roles are actually a deceptively simple comment of the state of masculinity, kind of like American Psycho (film > book IMO - interestingly the screenwriter of the film was a woman and the directory of the film was a woman, and the film & book are a critique of that version of masculinity).
Also Ryan's performance in The Big Short made me realise that he is CHOOSING to do his "silent" stuff when he does. He's a very talented actor.
Whoever is higher on the dominance hierarchy gets to subject others to their opinions. On HN it's a non issue
And for the record GATTACA is the story of a misguided insufferable asshole violating regulations and probably getting his entire team killed 5 minutes after the movie ends due to his heart condition.
[Gattaca spoiler warnings]
> outperform genetically perfect individuals through sheer "human spirit" (the film's term) which manifested as work ethic, drive, will, etc.
I didn't like Gattaca's message for that reason: it's fallacious to suggest those mental attributes aren't also subject to genetic advantages.
Another issue with the story is that the protagonist has a heart condition, and in the end he got on the spaceship's crew, which meant other people's lives were put at risk if he collapsed due to that heart condition in-transit. Salute the human spirit, but he put others at risk for his own benefit, and that's irresponsible and immoral.
> I could see a future where we've settled on the perfect genetic template for specific disciplines so we progress on to brain chemistry and/or psychology in order to reproduce the spirit aspect which separates the merely genetically blessed from the world class athletes.
Adderall, lol.
Genetics will be interesting, but I wonder if we eventually reach a point where it's even beyond that. To use Gattaca as an example, a person with vastly inferior genetics was able to outperform genetically perfect individuals through sheer "human spirit" (the film's term) which manifested as work ethic, drive, will, etc.
I could see a future where we've settled on the perfect genetic template for specific disciplines so we progress on to brain chemistry and/or psychology in order to reproduce the spirit aspect which separates the merely genetically blessed from the world class athletes.
A topic so close to my heart I can barely engage with it.
I credit my resilience to a sense of absolute worthlessness.
If you have seen the film Gattaca and the bit at the end how the non-modified person can beat the modified person... it comes down to not being afraid of the consequences, of literally being willing to die trying because what do you have to lose? That you would accept that, to die trying, stems from the worthlessness that one feels totally, and the worthlessness that the world and everyone around you communicates when you are so low.
Resilience, taking risks, fighting harder than anyone else, needing to always drive forwards or else fall backwards... for me it has an underlying secret: the profound sense of worthlessness as a human. From never really accepting you are valid and valuable even when you have "made it" by some definition. This is why I've made some decisions the way I have, I have nothing at all to lose... not even the value of life itself.
Which loops back to another recent theme on Twitter and HN and elsewhere... those dark thoughts of suicide if once thought, they never ever really leave.
NB: I'm fine, just being honest, feeling OK, in a good place... but this is what a hard life creates and such lives aren't lived for the purpose of being a lesson to others, and I'm not sure anyone should learn this lesson.
See the movie Gattaca. It doesn't deal with different species, but is has "valid" (genetically improved humans) and "invalid" (normal humans).
Wow this is amazing but scary like GATTACA the movie.
“They don’t discriminate against your being because you’re Jewish or gay, but because you’re you. And the worst thing is that it will be true. It sounds funny, but it’s terrible.”
reminds me of the movie gattaca.
> The key to remember is that a meritocracy is not fair.
I think you've just completely upended the meaning of meritocracy to suite your argument.
Next you'll be arguing lootboxes make games more fair.
>Think of the movie Gattaca
Was literally a movie about unfair privilege. people in it were granted privileges and opportunities based on their genes whether they had accomplished something or not.
It can be both privilege and meritocracy. Think of the movie Gattaca. The people with enhanced genes were privileged from the wealth of their parents, but also genuinely better in some areas because of that. The same thing if parents are able to afford tutors, or to spend time helping their child out in homework they will get better grades and do better. The key to remember is that a meritocracy is not fair.
Looks like we are not that far from the dystopian future depicted in the movie Gattaca[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
Timecrimes (Los Cronicriménes) — a mind bending Spanish movie with time travel and paradoxes
AI (Artificial Intelligence) — about a little android boy who develops feelings and emotions
Gattaca
Summer Time Machine Blues (Japanese) — a hilarious movie with time travel (and all its paradoxes)
Moon
Europa Report
[I've avoided mentioning the more recent mainstream movies.]
Here are my recommendations:
* Sunshine: I'll second this one, about a crew on a mission in space, turns into a different kind of film in the second half, which many people didn't like; has breathtaking visuals and a strong soundtrack.
* Her: A guy falls in love with an AI; has a wonderful atmosphere
* Gattaca: Set in a future of genetic engineering and how the protagonist fights against class discrimination
* Ex Machina, this was pretty hyped I'd say, but takes the opposite approach of Her and shows us the dangers of AI
* The Day the Earth Stood Still: a representative of aliens arrives on earth to tell humans to knock off their douchebaggery; still highly relevant today
* Metropolis: a silent film with a powerful score, set in a future with a large class disparity where the workers rebel
Honorable mentions that I'm not sure are really sci-fi: Brazil, The Prestige, Watchmen
Gattaca - a beautiful moving film with wonderful music (by Michael Nyman) about genetic engineering, discrimination and sheer determination.
For me, the movie Gattaca perfectly captures the importance of nature vs nurture. The equalizer is how one responds to adversity.
I expected there to be more discussion. This is literally Gattaca, about to take place. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
Wonder if they watch the movie Gattaca and think yes the perfect society.
Except for that small detail in that there aren't a set single or even set groupings of genes that determine IQ and there's tenuous data to support that we'll ever find such fixtures.
I really hate how every thread there's someone that jumps from "treating genetic disease" which is both small scale (in many cases just the expression of a single gene) and tangible (ready definitions and lack of trade offs in "not having cystic fibrosis" as opposed to "maybe smarter"). We're so close to saving real lives it's a waste of time to bring up a terrible dystopia movie(the reason gattaca's protagonist can't got to space is he's got a heart condition that's likely to kill him; not because he's lacking the hand-wavy "genetic ubermench" qualities) to construct an artificial ethical dilemma.
In the memo, he mentions that the gender differences "may" be the reason for the lesser number of women in technology. There are no studies which link the differences with ability to work as a computer programmer. I would prefer we do not impose labels or assume certain characteristics on people just because they belong to specific gender, race or come from specific background - especially when it is not something they control and when the link is tenuous.
My view was like yours before and the movie Gattaca was among the most important things that changed it. In short humans are far more complex and trying to say that a person may not be interested in software engineering just because the person is of specific gender is disservice to half the population and not helpful.
This is not just PC assertions. Generalizing characteristics of people based on their gender is harmful and exactly the reason racism is frowned upon.
If biological reasons can determine if a person is fit for a particular job, let us start deciding the traits of people based on the gender, race and blood samples and assign jobs based on that. If you haven't, please watch the movie Gattaca.
This exactly - it was mediocre crap. When you insinuate that some of your co-workers have certain drawbacks because of their gender, it makes that gender more aware of their behaviour and they are put in a position where they to take extra effort to prove otherwise. This is creating hostile environment for them. This is the reason why similar forms of generalisation, like racism, is frowned upon – not just because of innate sense of right or wrong. If this is being politically correct, then damn right I am politically correct.
This reminds me of the movie Gattaca - let us start deciding the traits of people based on the gender, race and blood samples and assign jobs based on that.
Is that a GATTACA reference? I think that's a GATTACA reference!
Great movie, well before it's time, worth watching for any hacker.
Especially now that sequencing is 100,000 times cheaper than it was 20 years ago.
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
I guess the movie "Gattaca" just got the location wrong.
In my class just Monday, we watched a film titled Gattaca, which tells the story of a society fueled by eugenics, where most births are in-vitro modified babies, and there is clear discrimination against those with "imperfect" genes. It's crazy how close these things are to reality.
It seems we're racing towards the events of Gattaca. It's easy to dismiss the movie as being similar to the far fetched distopian depictions in Minority Report, but in this case we actually have the technology to make it a reality.
IMO Gattaca makes a great case for genetic testing. An idiot with a major heart condition bluffs his way onto a space mission where he's likely to die and endanger the rest of the crew. If the testing had been a bit more thorough (say, if the doctor in charge of testing had done his job) then the mission wouldn't have been endangered.
It's strange to see everyone hold up this movie as an argument against this sort of testing.
Isn't this exactly the premise of the movie Gattaca? Great movie, BTW.
Gattaca is a movie filled with terrible science (there is no evidence of a simple gene change for intellectual ability, etc) and characters that are terrible people (NASA today doesn't allow people with heart conditions to go to space, no genetic dystopia required, because having astronauts die in transit is suboptimal to the mission).
I really wish that movie didn't get brought up every time gene therapy makes another advancement.
Total noob here, is this type of treatment going in the direction of something like in the movie gattaca? Would gene editing also help fully grown adults?
For me, I imagine a scenario like the movie GATTACA where in a future world an employer can base their entire hiring decision on what your genome says about you (theoretically, a lot). Imagine a world where business giants judge you by correlating huge amounts of data about you. "You shop for expensive purses and small dog toys, therefore statistically your personality is x, y, z"
When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking.
Mr Robot exists as it does because there are now enough people familiar with computers and the relevant concepts to constitute an audience, rather than due to any sudden insight on the part of screenwriters (of which I am one). We know, and have always known, that there's a distinct hacker subculture with its own linguistic tropes, ethos, etc. etc. and that there's been a big gap between reality and how it's portrayed in movies.
We also know (or learn the hard way) that there's a big gap between including enough detail for verisimilitude that will satisfy people who are competent in a particular field, and what the general public wants to watch - which is why you'll continue to see shallow or outright stupid portrayals of hacking in the entertainment industry's output. Why? Primarily [1] because the mass of people are just not interested in any given field that requires nerd-level commitment to understand. The larger the budget required for the film, the larger and more general the audience has to be, and the more accuracy and authenticity will be sacrificed in favor of spectacle and symbolism, which is the most reliable method for getting people to fork over their money in the first place.
Take a recent example from a different context - Jurassic World. The 'plot': capitalists and scientists employ DNA technology to produce a bigger, smarter, more aggressive dinosaur than has ever existed in nature; said dinosaur escapes from confinement and menaces everyone in the vicinity, especially the attractive hero, anti-heroine, and small children that are introduced early in the story. It's basically Frankenstein only with dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, the attractive proxy for the family unit survives and the bad dinosaur is defeated, though not before killing off the most ethically deficient characters by eating them like ham sandwiches.
Now, any biologists worth their salt would cringe at many scenes (if they watch such nonsense at all). Any genetic scientists had to suffer through yet another scene of an annoying smartass mumbling a few meaningless phrases about 'advanced gene splicing' while screens in the background display animations of double helixes and molecules. I think they might have mentioned CRISPR, I'm not sure and have no intention of watching it again to check.
Would Jurassic World have been better if it was more like Primer or Mr Robot, with in-depth discussions of structural factors and real-world constraints, and a hard-science approach that admitted of 1 (one) speculative assumption, from which the rest of the plot flowed organically? Sure,,,if you wanted to make Gattaca - Herpetology Edition. But though gattaca is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films, neither it nor Primer will ever appeal to a mass audience and so films like that will never have the most recognizable actors or the most astonishing visual spectacles or the same sort of short-term existential anxieties that would result from having to run or your life from a creature the size of an apartment building.
People go to Big Movies to allay their quotidian existential anxieties (about which they often feel helpless) by seeing them safely reflected [2] in contexts that are outside normal human experience. How far outside is primarily inversely proportional to the budget and corresponding box-office performance requirements, while being secondarily proportional to the depth of the underlying existential anxiety.
Hacking in films has simply been a proxy for magic, in line with Clarke's observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic serves an important dramatic function as the source of the unknowable solution to the Intractable Problem with which the story's characters are presented.Thus, magic and its various proxies (specialist bodies of knowledge, from hacking to legal procedure to medical knowledge) is not a black hole which encapsulates the ignorance of the writer (although many inferior or lazy writers abuse it for that purpose) but a singularity which offers the possibility of escape from the otherwise-inexorable logic of the story world; it symbolizes the hope of a future discoverable solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.
A few examples from popular films may illuminate this. In Star Wars the insoluble problem is a spaceship that can blow up an entire planet. The magical device is The Force, a limited but still useful psychokinetic ability. In the Alien films the insoluble problem is an ambulatory disease; the magic device is an artificially intelligent android that can approach the alien closely enough to observe a weakness of some kind (but which has to be temporarily decommissioned first, like Dumbo losing the magic feather). In the Terminator films, the insoluble problem is nuclear conflagration as the crystallization of war in general; the magical device is industrial capitalism's promise of reducing economic inequality (represented by the vast technological superiority of the Terminators themselves).
To wrap up, Mr Robot hasn't killed the Hollywood hacker at all; it has just crushed his dreams and forced him into getting a day job, which is the function that television shows perform relative to movies. You'll still see hackers in movies, but strictly as lip service to a real and increasingly less aspirational employment demographic. This might seem like an odd conclusion to draw, but it's worth bearing in mind that that serial television dramas are general occupational comedies (I'm using the term 'comedy' in the technical sense of everything basically going back to normal at the end of the episode, even if the subject matter isn't funny at all). Consider cop shows; they follow a nice steady formula with an initial outrage, a bit of detective work, an uncomfortable moral confrontation, a setback, and finally a little bit of legal procedure. On the other hand if you watch a movie about cops, they almost invariably take place at the beginnings or ends of the lead characters' careers, and the Best Person in the movie almost invariably has to die.
1. there are other reasons but I don't want to turn this into an essay on screenwriting.
2. A few films address this dichotomy as their subject matter, albeit indirectly. All films have a political dimension insofar as the choice of subject matter and its portrayal reflect some aspect of their originating policy which the creators aim to praise or criticize, but relatively few dramatize the critical process itself; invariably, the subtext of such films is that critical awareness forces us to choose sides in an ongoing moral conflict; or put another way, moral agency comes at the price of other kinds. Generally in these films the lead has to either die or give up the old life completely in an anti-hero pattern.
GATTACA just relied on gene analysis (including among a number of blastocycts) but no gene editing. Though I was very annoyed at that movie for implying that people who get diseases just have insufficient willpower.
I agree with all of these but have to add some, because you are missing a lot of the classics.
- Alien (talk about classic Sci-Fi Horror)
- Westworld (watch the movie before the show. Trust me)
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
- The Thing (I've only seen the old one)
- Moon
- Children of Men
- 12 Monkeys
- Gattaca
- Blade Runner
- Dark City
- Akira (anime)
- Primer (my favourite time travel film)
- Interstellar
- Black Mirror
- Psycho-Pass (anime)
And of course everyone needs to watch - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
2001: A Space Odyssey
Sunshine
Blade Runner, gattaca, the matrix, alien etc.etc. basically just google "best sci fi movies of all time"
You should see the movie "Gattaca". Great movie that explores this question.
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
See the movie gattaca for a decent exploration of this theme.
Brb rewatching GATTACA.
(great film, if any of you haven't seen it)
It't not about making "more", it's about making "better", not leaving everything up to chance.
See the movie Gattaca, for an example.
The future is now - 1) Self-driving cars 2) Flights to Mars in the next 10 years 3) Gene Therapy and Crisper 4) Robots are actual real world discussions
Happily no flying cars (We would all die), No AI yet (In the future AI I love and respect you and welcome your presence in our world)
Gattaca - The film presents a biopunk vision of a future society driven by eugenics where potential children are conceived through genetic manipulation to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. The film centers on Vincent Freeman, played by Hawke, who was conceived outside the eugenics program and struggles to overcome genetic discrimination to realize his dream of traveling into space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
This is just the crack in the wall. Philosophy and Ethical questions will make this one of the biggest stories for the next decade or more.
Human biology is a rather robust system.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/survival-of-the-flattest/
>"Let's change this very, very large, very, very old system that we don't really understand by just tweaking this one value that we're pretty sure does X ... and put it back into production. What could possibly go wrong?"
In a good number of cases, what some nucleotide does is pretty obvious.
There is a safer approach that can also result in very good ends. Embryo selection (what was in the Gattaca film). You make up 20 embryos in the lab, sequence all of them, pick the best one according to a set of criteria.
Estimated IQ gain is in the range of 10 IIRc per generation. Chinese are planning to do this - if they pull it off, inside 2 generations they'd have better human capital than Ashkenazi Jews (.2% of world population, 30%+ of physics Nobels, due to average verbal IQ of 115. That really skews distribution in the high-end...)
> If you haven't watched it since HS like most people, I'd encourage you to watch it again.
Just did, available on Amazon Prime for streaming. Just as good as I remembered.
> There is nothing noble about hiding a heart condition in order to become a crucial member on an expedition that will almost certainly kill you.
There's something disgusting about telling people what they can and can't do without actually testing whether they can do it or not.
You see, when you test actual ability, you're confirming an almost infinite amount of data points all at once. Your picture is complete and no understanding is necessary. It's a binary proposition. You either can or can't.
When you test for a genetic disposition ... it's just that. A disposition. You're testing only a single data point. That data point might be very important ... or it might not. Either way, it's a terrible way to determine actual ability.
He wasn't negligent in the slightest. It was all the useless genetic testing. They should have been testing his ability. If they did that, there wouldn't be a movie or anything to be outraged over.
> On top of that the distopia just ended up feeling shallow.
The movie is over 20 years old. I'd say it held up as well as could be expected.
> We're never given any reason as to why society drops any pretense at meritocracy just because of the availability of genetically optimized babies
Laziness. Why go through the trouble of testing ability, which is very hard ... vs pressing a button on a computer?
> The most major discrimination is that a space flight agency doesn't want an astronaut with a high probability of dieing mid mission.
The movie made it clear that this discrimination was pervasive in every walk of life ... which makes sense. Why hire a genetically inferior person if you can determine that through the press of a button?
> That's not only perfectly reasonable it's also what we do now.
No we don't. We do actual physical testing. We set up physical parameters that the person must clearly demonstrate. I mean, that's why they call it a physical.
> Vincent never would be allowed on a NASA space flight anymore than he should have been allowed on the GATTACA flight.
No, he wouldn't. You're right. Because he's myopic. Which by the way, is not a genetically inherited defect, although it was thought to be at the time the movie was made.
But if the assumption that genetics played a part in myopia was perpetuated in the future as it is in the movie, that would be a truly sad state of affairs.
You would have people being discriminated against for no valid rational reason. That's the point of this movie. Genetics very rarely determine a certainty. Merely a probability.
> Gattaca is a film everyone should see if only to understand that the lay person has no business weighing in on issues of scientific ethics.
Wow. I don't think scientists should have a monopoly on ethics. Pass.
I really wish that movie would stop being brought up. If you haven't watched it since HS like most people, I'd encourage you to watch it again. There is nothing noble about hiding a heart condition in order to become a crucial member on an expedition that will almost certainly kill you.
On top of that the distopia just ended up feeling shallow. We're never given any reason as to why society drops any pretense at meritocracy just because of the availability of genetically optimized babies (to say nothing of the handwaving around genetic markers for fuzzy traits like intelligence nor the idea that environment plays a nontrivial part in development). The most major discrimination is that a space flight agency doesn't want an astronaut with a high probability of dieing mid mission. That's not only perfectly reasonable it's also what we do now. Vincent never would be allowed on a NASA space flight anymore than he should have been allowed on the GATTACA flight.
Gattaca is a film everyone should see if only to understand that the lay person has no business weighing in on issues of scientific ethics. A tale of human exceptionalism that does a great job of ignoring any of the science it claims to take inspiration from.
Let's say a generation of humans is born from perfect genetic combinations. Wouldn't natural children from that generation keep the same strong genes?
What about epigenetics? If some proto-übermensch were afforded - due to automization and superior talents - to live a far more leisurely life than our own, and spend it with drugs, food, and entertainment, wouldn't that cause genetic regression?
I think the problem with Gattaca is that the movie was so damn good at tackling the issue it's made itself the sole narrative that we understand, even though science has advanced tremendously in concepts such as epigenetics and the microbiome. We need a new narrative to understand our new situation.
Those who haven't seen it, should definitely see Gattaca. Good movie, but aside from that, posits a premise that I think will resonate with virtually everyone. That we are more than the sum of our parts. That there are unquantifiable attributes like willpower, perseverance, honor, compassion, etc. that arise out of adversity and overcoming our shortcomings. Is a genetically perfect human inferior because they were never subjected to the travails of imperfection?
Those are the questions that will bounce around in the heads of parents ... and they may lead them to have kids the old-fashioned way.
if you haven't seen it, the film Gattaca covers this very well http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
I was also thrown off by this movie. I remember watching it in college. It seemed very disjointed, throwing around a bunch of dialogue, vocab, characters, politics, etc. at me that seemed badly translated and only poorly if ever explained or described. Sure, plenty of eye candy and then some somewhat intriguing AI stuff at the end. Recently, I tried watching a couple episodes of SAC, and while it was easier to follow, it felt again like I was only understanding about half the dialogue.
I am also told that it can be a little off-putting or disorienting to some because it is more concept-driven than plot-driven, which, in addition to being an awkward mashing together of the beginning and the end of the manga (manga wrangling seems in some form or other a common source of awkwardness in anime- e.g. Akira), is probably why it was hard for me to follow. To each his own, I suppose, but I think it's cool when you have both a well-told story AND intriguing concepts (e.g. Neuromancer, Gattaca, Blade Runner, etc.)
I've been thinking about Gattaca a lot lately too. It's interesting to me how in the film the mechanism for controlling genetics was to create a bunch of zygotes and then to pick the best one. But what seems to be happening now (the creepily named CRISPR and all that) is that people are editing existing DNA and controlling how DNA functions in living people.
I don't know if I would say it's "most prescient today", but Gattaca was always one of my favorite SF films, and some of what it portrayed may well be coming our way in the not-so-distant future.
This is tangential to your post, but, everyone that watched Gattaca in high school and remember it as a good, thought provoking movie needs to sit down and watch it again. Gattaca is a terrible movie both from a general plot and from a scientific perspective. When the "hero" of a movie is the jackass that cons his way onto a crucial role in a space mission knowing it will kill him and leave the crew a man down, it's probably prudent to start asking questions about the other aspects. As far as we can determine the genetics for ambiguous traits like intelligence or physical ability are deeply complex and cross coupled things and it grinds my gears to have the "but Gattaca" crowd crawl out of the wood work everytime for topics like research into preventing recessive diseases like cystic fibrosis comes up.
Gattaca[1] is a fun sci-fi movie depicting a world where gene selection is predominant and workforce selection is based on genetics. It's pretty entertaining, and not a half bad look at the problems of that society.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
It's ridiculous to start going back to this sort of racism. This is the "affirmative action or positive discrimination" that is tearing apart Africa right now.
The only sort of racism that should even be considered these days would be genetic research of ethnic groups. That's not something evil BTW. Researching those prone to heart disease, cancer or have positive/useful genes that could be used to protect all of us in the future. Alas, we aren't living the movie Gattaca yet.
"Moving the goalposts" implies that I established some criteria and than changed it. I did no such thing.
>Gattaca was specifically about genetic testing.
If that's how you read/watch science fiction, you're wasting your time. Gattaca and Brave New World are dystopian stories. Dystopias are not meant to precisely predict the future. They are mean to show how the future will look like if certain conditions are met. The overall reasoning matters far more than specifics.
The overall reasoning in Gattaca looks solid. And we're nowhere near the level of genetic testing/engineering technology shown in the movie. But we're getting there.
>Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.
Where was this government involvement described?
http://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html
I don't recall the book explicitly speaking about government involvement with Soma at all, aside from the implication that government approved of it. FDA approves all the anti-depressants and painkillers as well. So?
People emigrating to escape genocide have a different definition of failure which makes them more risk-tolerant.
When someone whose definition of failure is getting buried in an unmarked mass grave is competing against someone whose definition of failure is sleeping in their car for a few months, that first guy will risk more to win.
I recall from the movie Gattaca, when the natural-genes protagonist had a swimming contest against his engineered-genes brother, and won, the latter demanded to know "How did you beat me?!" and the former responded, "I never saved anything for the swim back." He was prepared to drown, so long as he could win before dying.
Having to go back to square one seems like a failure only to those people who are not aware that there is a square zero. For those people, square one is still one step away from failure.
I agree with you that editing the human genome is not generally ethically objectionable and should be allowed, but I also think that tinkering with our genome will create a whole new set of societal issues that will reinforce the current ones, which humanity has been historically bad at solving.
Imagine a world where genetical engineering is very effective, but not cheap. The already advantaged can create designer babies and therefore have the ability to give their offspring an additional edge. Social mobility could be seriously limited if unmodified humans have a worse chance to get good work or work at all. Even today, many people see the poor as inferior because they often have a bad education. In the future, they could be legitimately genetically inferior.
Gattaca (1997) is an excellent movie with a similar theme: “A genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel“.
Gattaca (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177) left a lasting impression on me. It initially reads like dystopian scifi but at it's core it's really about persistence and overcoming obstacles.
For some reason Gattaca doesn't seem like that much of a dystopia. Poverty and disease are largely conquered. It's a harsh future that fosters alienation (or there wouldn't be much of a movie), yet the problems of that world seem fewer than those of today.
The dystopian film of the late 90's I recall being most frequently cited as a glimpse at our future was "GATTACA". While that portrayal may one day come to pass, it doesn't feel like something immediately dangerous.
"Enemy of the State" wasn't a particularly great film at the time it was released, but these days it feels remarkably prescient. We've willingly accepted an eerily similar world to live in, and we have to place an awful lot of trust into those at the helm...
I think it is unfortunate when people do not express their biological potential, but I'm not sure that's what people actually want to talk about. I'm not sure that really improves the human condition.
I see the problem as the sum of human economic actions creating a structure where only a few people can win and most people must lose. What does it matter if we bump up people's IQ? Would that make it so that more people try to apply to be leaders and CEO's of tomorrow, when there are so few positions available?
Is the lack of meritocracy the principle emotional bother here? Does society become better if it were meritocratic? I don't think so. Why not focus on the fact that there's a race where only a few people win? Is it because we're okay with the current distribution of wealth if we find out that it corresponds with intelligence?
All I see from this is a more efficient nation due to better labor allocation, which is an agreeable value, but is that what people wanted to talk about? Economic inefficiency due to bad labor allocation?
I think GATTACA shows a meritocratic world. A very meritocratic world. Now, it may be that the movie has some moral message to deliver on "true potential" being more than biology, but that society was largely on target with identifying potential, at least way better than our current world. A few errors now and then sounds very tolerable for a futuristic system, even if it results in a few tragic stories about a denied astronaut with heart problems. I'm sure they can improve and become even more accurate at identifying aspects of human merit.
But in that world, we have corporate dominance of working opportunities, elite rule over inferior biology, a feeling of fate, and shitty jobs -- a world of winners and losers. There will always be more people of merit than there will be jobs of merit. If this last statement is true, what are the implications for the losers of society?
It's illegal in the movie Gattaca too. :D
You should check out Gattaca [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/]. It's a great movie that explores some of the negatives that crop up from a society that genetically sequences all citizens from birth.
I'm pretty soon you can just break it down into 2 groups. Morlocks and Eloi...
Unrelated, this does make me want to watch Gattaca[1] again :)
[1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
I'm not the biggest Hollywood fan, but what do you think about movies like Gattaca, Minority Report?
We aren't even anywhere close to such fictional understanding of the role of DNA and nature-vs-nurture mechanics of human development, or even what sentience is. And you think we can use DNA to judge people? I never said "lets pretend heritability doesn't exit", I implied we can't judge people based on whatever you think we do know about it.
If you're having difficulty understanding what all the fuss is about, try watching Gattaca.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
>>Do you also believe that you can reliably assess it in a face to face interview with a candidate?
Nope, I don't. I absolutely believe there is a significant margin of error there but I also believe that, as human beings, we have to accept that we cannot be standardized plug-n-play hardware rather than try and come up with an algorithm that we rely on to tell us if a person is a good candidate or not. FWIW, I'm also against standardized testing in schools. You just end up people who are groomed specifically for those tests and in general the word "standardized" is kinda opposite of "diversity".
>>How sure are you that you're not just assessing a candidate's ability to be confident and unflappable in a job interview?
For dev jobs, at least you have background checks on past employment and/or education, a few coding tests and discussions around them to at least know this person isn't a totally 100% Grade-A Fraud. But indeed it is possible to end up with someone who just guessed right & prepared before hand for your questions then totally falls on their face the first month on the job.
>>Have you ever had the experience of hiring someone who did amazingly well in their interview and turned out to be a total zero on your dev team? I'm very wary of subjective signals I get from interviews.
I've seen this happen in at&t, more than once, where standardized'ish interviews were easy to guess and some people just knew exactly what to say and nobody applied any fraud-detection. But I admit I've also seen this happen in heavy culture-fit oriented interviews that still manage to leave something out. e.g., maybe the candidate actually gets frustrated easily and becomes very difficult to work with. If they did well in the interview then you never got to see what happens when they don't do well.
Personally, I think this is just the chance we have to take as a society. If we really try hard to apply algos to humans I think we'll end up with a bunch of problems. I can see people grooming themselves specifically for those algos and I just don't think that's healthy for standardized interviews or standardized tests in schools.
But indeed, this is all touchy-feeling-fuzzy-intangible-indefensible stuff.
There's a movie called Gattaca: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ That kinda talks about this and it turns out people get different impressions from this movie. Some people think what the main character did was unjustified fraud and some people think it's society that treated him unfairly because an algorithm said he was unfit for the role.
GATTACA was a film about a society that only thought they were measuring genetic superiority.
Which is still a great warning to heed, but the hero of the film is the hero because he proves that the genetic screening was wrong about him.
My take on this is that either make it free for everyone or don't do it at all. If you only allow the rich to have this treatment ( is there a better word for it) then you are artificially inviting a whole new brand of racism and social inequality into the system.
Also everyone should watch Gattaca, it is one of best movies that shows how social inequality can arise in situations like these.
> There is the GATTACA argument that unequal access to genetic modification will foster even greater socioeconomic inequality than we already face today.
Absolutely nothing we can do artificially will have as great of an impact than genetically gifted individuals having children together ... which is already happening and has been happening for eons ... I mean, that's what evolution is. The smart get smarter, the fast get faster, the strong get stronger, and the inferior disappear from the gene pool.
If anything, genetic modification will allow the less gifted to pool funds and improve their own gene pool in a way that was simply not possible before.
Now, I think all of this is futile, for reasons touched in GATTACA. It is my absolute most favorite movie. Watch it again =)
There is the GATTACA argument that unequal access to genetic modification will foster even greater socioeconomic inequality than we already face today. The film imagined a future in which genetic superiority could be measured by percentile and that job eligibility was based almost exclusively on your genetic score.
The implication is that the widespread but costly availability of genetic modification in tandem with free market capitalism would necessarily form such an enormous social wedge.
I haven't thought about the issue enough to agree or disagree with the theory, but I am stating it here as a potential answer to your question.
I love how these kinds of discoveries challenge, if not out right shatter, our current scientific understanding of human beings.
Again, I recommend Gattaca movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
Don't let medical science try to dictate your potential based on gender, race or anything about your DNA. They're only right until they find out they're wrong.
Well, Gattaca raises a bigger point that just "Should we discriminate based on DNA?" In Gattaca, people can choose to genetically enhance their offspring to attain certain qualities. The protagonist's parents chose to make him in a "natural" way and hence he was considered to be the less extreme version of Untermensch. The director chose to portray such policies / societal norms as morally wrong (primarily through an emotional appeal). But it doesn't touch upon the other side of this issue. How well did humanity perform after humans were artificially evolved into what by some could be considered a new species. Except a few discriminatory cases -- much less than say Women and other minorities experience at the moment -- Gattaca doesn't seem too horrible, with space ships and space colonization. The movie can be thought of as depicting a Neanderthal that happens to be stuck in a Homo Sapiens Sapiens dominated society, and after facing adversity -- eventually succeeds. I think the issue is larger than that. Perhaps it's trying to make us consider the possible collective benefits of Humankind as a whole if it were allowed to fast-track its natural evolutionary processes. After all, if all humans became "Homo Sapiens Sapiens Sapiens" wouldn't we be better off?
Gattaca was very prescient and thought-provoking movie, one of my favorites. The story described a future where individuals are allowed or denied opportunity based on a genetic test at birth. I think the point was that technology cannot predict or limit the human heart.
That same idea applies here too. This article illustrates that there will be other, nuanced perils to bioinformatics besides rewarding genetic lottery winners and punishing losers. Genetic testing is a powerful tool that should be used wisely. Of course, it will be a bumpy road until society settles on what "wisely" means.
It raises a lot of ethical questions. There was a great movie that touched those issues: "Gattaca".
So? The world of GATTACA seemed pretty awesome. Everyone was smart and fit and healthy and good-looking.
In fact, life was so perfect that the writers had to postulate the existence of non-genetically-engineered people in order to have any drama at all. "Wouldn't it suck if you were born into this society without any genetic enhancement?" the movie asks. And the answer is: yeah, so you should genetically engineer your children.
> But then we go full GATTACA.
Gattaca is just a scifi movie, not particularly good at science realism. We should not take guidelines for Artificial Intelligence research from the Terminator movies, and we should not take genetics guidelines from Gattaca.
There are other, less nice implications too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Is a good read, also the movie Gattaca (obviously fiction, but raises some interesting questions).
>'Then go back to your coding...'
...where you imagine that you actually are working on trajectories - at Gattaca Aerospace [1].
(Great movie, one of my favorites.)
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
> Sometimes I comb my hair, or bite my fingernails. What if part of it fell on the floor and some random person steps on it. Stuck on the bottom of their shoe. A bunch of coincidental stuff comes up and my DNA is tested against a fingernail/hair under victim's shoe... match. I'm doomed.
This is a plot point in the film Gattaca. I'd recommend watching it if you haven't already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
That's the exact reason why I love the movie theater: no one has any control at all outside of walking out, so everyone pushes their ADHD to the side and commits to the movie for two hours. Once the movie is over, you might still think it was shitty and a waste of time, but at least you gave it a fair shot.
Try watching a slow movie like Gattaca at home, with a dozen devices and apps competing to take your attention away, and see how many people drift off and watch it from the corner of an eye or don't even finish it at all. Does the movie deserve that? Maybe; if only short-form content or frenetic Avengers-like action can hold people's attention from start to finish, then that's how it is. But I, for one, appreciate immensely when people commit fully to something, the way it was intended to, for better or for worse.
And that's why I love the movie theater.
As a continuation of this, it's worth watching Gattaca if you never have. Great film in it's own right too, pity Andrew Niccol's been off his game the last couple.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
The 'science' in Gattaca is just an excuse for segregating human beings based on some arbitrary criteria. As others have pointed out this is nothing new.
What is extremely irritating is that people actually think that genetics works the way it is portrayed in the film. This is patently false. Yes, some portion of what an organism is is determined by the primary sequence of its DNA. It turns out that the contribution of primary sequence alone is quite small. Look at all the naive genome wide association data sets that have revealed that primary DNA sequences are in most cases very poor predictors of phenotype. This should't be surprising to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of evolution and the interaction between ecology and development. Yes, this is classic nurture vs nature stuff.
The fact that people want to claim that science could actually give us a universal, deterministic and predictive answer about the future should quickly alert us that the principles on which they are basing their predictions is not science and not predictive, but instead an ideology based on prejudice rather than evidence.
> We need to accept our genetic limits and act accordingly.
This statement reminds me a lot of the movie Gattaca.
One should never discount the importance of ambition, work ethic and passion.
You should probably watch Gattaca - the answer to your question is pretty much the whole point of that film. Or if you don't want to watch, at least to read the first two paragraphs of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca.
> We're leaving DNA traces everywhere.
There's a scene from the movie Gattaca where Ethan Hawke is cleaning everything from his desk and keyboard in order not to leave any "DNA traces". First saw that film 10+ years ago but it has always stuck with me.
That's nice but you still have to worry about tampering with evidence, planted evidence, bad assumptions, bogus experts, etc. Or maybe I just watch too many movies ;-)
Like after watching the movie Gattaca, I wonder how much of our DNA is just out there floating around? If there are any good books on DNA matching that are worth reading, post some links please.
As I say in a comment elsewhere in this thread, I find the dissent on this extremely illuminating and tend to agree with it. One thing the court can't consider right now (since it's a hypothetical future and that's rightly not their business) is that some day, DNA sequencing is going to be dirt cheap and super fast. It is only a matter of time. When that happens, what will the court think about the police driving around hoovering up all the hair and cells you shed every day? You know, just to solve those cold cases to see if anyone turns up?
People get all worked up over automated license plate readers but the thought of the above happening makes GATTACA (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) look like Disneyland.
I think you meant GATTACA, the movie? To anyone who hasn't seen it, fantastic movie. Highly recommended.
Re: your other points. I think your concerns are well placed, however this isn't something that's specific to Counsyl; 23andme presumably also carries the same risks. At any rate, I do believe they hold your genetic information to the same standards as required in HIPAA.
Duh. I'm adding it right now.
I'm also in the middle of watching Dollhouse, which is an incredible TV series by Joss Whedon dealing with mind control. I think it does a better job than Gattaca of dealing with ethical quandaries of bio-tech, and most likely the more difficult battle we'll fight as our brains become more akin to software. The arguments in Gattaca seem like a straw man that very few people would actually advocate.
Did you ever see Gattaca? That great movie, all about eugenetics!
>To fix this, Lambie-Nairn simply straightened up the boxes, removed the dashes, and changed the font to Gill Sans - a typeface which had been invented 60 years ago, meaning there were no worries of it quickly looking outdated.
A really clever design principle. I've always thought it was most effectively used in film (e.g. Gattaca).
1. Ghost in the Shell 2. Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex - series not a movie 3. Primer 4. Zizek The Movie 5. Pi 6. Gattaca 7. Waydowntown
There is one great movie about this: Gattaca (1997) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
The "sci fi" distributions channels that you're describing were taken over by the "horror/moneymaking" people. I wouldn't even call most of that science fiction.
For more recent works, you might like:
Vernor Vinge "Rainbow's End" -- more near term and what you describe "A Fire Upon the Deep" & "A Deepness in the Sky"
David Brin "Earth" -- again, more near term, although with a fantastic ending The Uplift Trilogy (a bit more fantastic, but very well done, particularly the 2nd and 3rd novels)
There are many "classic" authors and novels. One novel that receives somewhat less attention/accolades, but which I think speaks to some of what you ask, is:
Arthur C. Clarke "The City and the Stars"
Neal Stephenson' The Diamond Age might also resonate. And while both more "near term" and historical, his Cryptonomicon has some very worthy reflections and speculations.
And I guess I really can't pass up suggesting Carl Sagan's Contact. Superb.
As for films, I'm not the most versed, but the following, more "real" science fiction films come to mind:
GATTACA Blade Runner (yeah, yeah, but I just re-watched it) And I'll mention that Star Trek (particularly, for me, The Next Generation), is now on or coming to Netflix
P.S. And of course, William Gibson's Neuromancer and, was it the next one or the next two novels? His short story collection, "Burning Chrome", fits well into these two or three.
And as for a certain pragmatic perspective on human psychology, behavior, and possible near term societal/political developments, the classic Heinlein ouvre, while perhaps sexist or interpretable as such, and also in other ways somewhat "archaic", is nonetheless insightful.
Probably not what you're looking for, but now that I've rambled on, there it is.
P.P.S. I found Asimov's original "Robot" trilogy a very insightful allegory for the competing demands of public knowledge and privacy in the modern world. Set aside the robotic aspect, per se, and look at how the different societies lead there lives and social conduct.
Then again, how do most people choose their careers.
- I like video games, so I'll be a programmer.
- I want to be a ballerina / baseball player / rock star / etc.
- Read a sci fi book and now want to do genetic engineering.
- Read My Life As A Quant and want to be a quant.
A friend of mine is a life sciences lawyer at a firm that bills upwards of $800/hr ... his reason for choosing that path was watching the movie Gattaca. Not joking.
> - Blood is far from being that dense, but I'll assume you mean to calculate a theoretical limit.
There are more ways of having cells arranged, I explicitly mentioned red blood cells because they are exceptional in not containing any DNA, but any chunk of tissue with that volume would do.
> If you use the whole of a cell's DNA to encode information, the cell will die. It can't be used to freely encode information like a hard disk.
Yes, that's obvious, but a cell's DNA does hold that much information, it's just not our information.
> - There is no way to retrieve information in this system.
There actually is, the information retrieval mechanism that is used to 'express' the DNA (actually, the RNA, an 'unzipped' strand of DNA, but who's counting) is a wonderful little nano machine called a ribosome, it's probably the most amazing structure that I know of outside of the DNA itself.
They're in the volume quoted, the DNA only occupies about 25% of that volume iirc.
> Reliability of hard disks is far, far better than this.
The error correction mechanism that allows your cells to be copied through very large numbers of generations is actually pretty good, most 'mutations' are lethal and only very few actually result in viable copies passing their changes on to newer generations. Mutations are also pretty rare on the whole.
You are right that only TC and AG are valid, but those combinations can be attached 'in reverse' as well (CT / GA) so that makes for four possible combinations in all.
If it weren't for that the movie 'GATTACA' would have been unpronouncable :)
Eugenics with a better name. With `modified' humans comes new prejudice. The movie Gattaca has it nailed.
The title is "Gattaca" for a reason: four bases found in DNA are adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). It's fantastic movie IMO.
You may want to see the Gattaca movie ;)
> What exactly makes watching a thoughtful, well-crafted drama (for instance, The Wire) on television any less worthy than reading a good back or going to watch a play?
Great question. A few points:
1. A play or movie has a start and end time that is reasonably compressed - you watch Memento or Gattaca, it takes you two hours, you sit and think about it afterwards for a while, and it's done. A high quality program will run for many seasons, taking 30 minutes to an hour of your life times X weeks for however long. Also, being not as compressed, the average quality tends to be lower (with some exceptions of very good programming, though it's rare).
2. Very easy to just keep watching after the high quality program ends, watching the next thing that comes on. Very, very easy to do that. My housemate last year had a TV hooked to a DVD player and Nintendo Wii for parties, but no channels. I did buy him a box set of Planet Earth for his birthday after seeing some of it at a friend's house. But it's like, put on the DVD, watch it, put it away, done. No getting sucked in.
3. Garbage books are no good either - I tend to read books that give me a perspective on another culture (Koda Rohan, Eiji Yoshikawa, or Genji for Japan, for instance), or read business books, technical books, history, economics, finance, etc. I'd classify a lot of fiction as similarly mindlessly-distracting-without-growth too. That's fine for what it is, but I'd rather get the enjoyment while also developing as a person, asking myself tough questions, getting more in touch with another culture, gaining expertise, and so on.
But sure, there's some good TV. I used to go do cardio at the gym whenever a sports match was on that I wanted to watch, for instance, because they had a bunch of TVs, and I'd go during the fifth inning or halftime and watch the end of the game. I might buy a boxed set of DVDs and have a weekend marathon at my place sometime if a show is really good, insightful, and develops the character.
Still, I don't watch television regularly because I think I'll have a healthier, happier, more productive life where I reach more of my goals if it's not part of my life. Perhaps some people have knee jerk anti-TV reactions as a signaling mechanism that they're "unplugged", but that's not it in my case. Some TV is really cool. I watched some Top Gear at one of my English friend's flats in London, and it's just really enjoyable. The question was still - wait, is this what I should be doing with my time? Couldn't I be enjoying myself while also learning, or producing something, or connecting more deeply with someone I like? It's a keenly thought out thing that I made a conscious decision about a long time, but I'm not one of those horrible anti-TV preachy people. If it serves a role in a person's life and they're happy with its effect, then it's a good thing for them.
In a nutshell, the audience for nuanced, elaborately plotted scripts is not as big as that for epic hammy ones. The movie industry (qua theaters) is not really about movies so much as it is a marketing operation for comfy chairs, sugary drinks, and popcorn. Hence the big-budget movie emphasis on the 'wow' factor, best appreciated via a 75-foot screen.
To some extent, it's always been this way. Look at Shakespeare: most of his plays are set in foreign countries which would have been terribly exotic to his audience, or are concerned with battles, magic, or murder - it's all pretty sensationalist stuff.
With this sort of big-budget production story complexity takes a back seat to putting the audience 'into' the experience. Gattaca is a fine sci-fi movie that turns on a clever script and strong acting performances, but it wasn't exactly a box-office sensation. But it was pretty cheap to make. with something like Avatar you want a story that everyone can follow easily rather than one that risks alienating any segment of the audience. Epic stories generally try to minimize ambiguity and complexity: the payoff is emotional rather than intellectual.
> Damn if I could study or learn shit if I'm a starving refugee.
You know that most (90%+) Africans are not starving? Africa isn't filled by starving refugees as CNN would like you to believe.
I think the most common comparison with Africans is in the USA.
> Oh, and I can't believe nobody's seen the film "Gattaca."
This is an excellent (and was my favorite) movie and I identify strongly with the main character.
While the movie sends a powerful image, now matter how hard you try, you will not change a person's general intelligence (which is innate).
This article completely side stepped issues of how important everything else is to our lives. We won't solve disease by genetic knowledge. What food we eat, the happiness in our lives, our exercise...these are so important. Genetic knowledge won't teach us how to be healthy, just and peaceful.
As for the differences between the races, as much as they might exist, I can't believe how people can be blind to how culture is extremely influencial.
Take your so-called smarter race (e.g. asian), take them to a "dumber" place like America, and in a few generations they'll be just as dumb.
And the asians aren't smarter. I live in China now, teaching English. Their education system, and the Asian education system in general (i.e. China/Japan/Korea) strongly develops certain skills. Mostly, these involve analysis, logic, and memorization.
However, while this form of education is outstanding for producing people that can do very well at coursework and following directions (as well as become excellent engineers/doctors/research assistants/accountants), it is very poor at producing people who can think for themselves and be creative thinkers. It certainly does not develop critical thinking.
As for the African stereotype...have you looked at what's going on over there? Damn if I could study or learn shit if I'm a starving refugee.
Oh, and I can't believe nobody's seen the film "Gattaca."
I'm not sure I follow you there.
Lots of things are heritable, we have tons of proof for that. But everything ? You've just thrown out the possibility for anybody to overcome their genetic pre-disposition and to surpass their endowment.
Gattaca is a movie around that whole theme.
Sure you inherit a whole bunch of stuff from your parents, but your mental make-up is in large part due to how you are brought up and how much effort you put in to making something from that which you were given.
If 'success' were heritable then all the successful businesspeople would have successful children, they should, especially given that they have daddy/mommy as a jump off point.
The opposite is just as likely though.
Family fortunes are usually cyclic:
- one generation works very hard, creates a base
- the next one runs with it, makes a fortune
- the one after that has it easy, doesn't do much, but has lots of money
- the one after that squanders the remainder
It's very rare to see a family continue to be successful in an unbroken line given the freedom of choice to perform or to be lazy.
Gattaca is a place that exists because your environment, luck, and habits are all controlled to some extent. Imagine a rat in a cage - stimulated to exercise, rest, learn, eat, exactly what you want, when you want. You can eliminate nearly all of the variables if you wish. Think of Gattaca in this way and Ethan Hawks character is a "Neo". Great movie!
Gattaca is a well-done movie in general. My wife liked it, and she prefers art films and usually does not like science fiction.
Gattaca is a great movie -- one of my favorites -- but genetics is not predestination. The environment plays a huge role in the development of children and many diseases are not genetic in nature at all. Many other diseases and conditions are a combination of genetics and environment.
Are we in danger of creating a society of a "genetic upper class"? Sure, as long as there are people willing to buy into the idea that genetics determines our future there will be people that want to exploit that for their own personal gain. But that is why it will continue to be our duty to defend the dignity of human beings and use science to improve the lot of all of us, not to exclude some in favor of others based on some pseudo-scientific eugenicist fantasy.
I think Gattaca has to be one of the very best predictive near SF movies.
From multi-touch user interfaces to immense speedups in the analysis of genetic data and the social changes that would bring with it.
Plenty of people - smart ones at that - still disagree with that opinion though, I wonder why.
Even if the exact situation is hard to predict these things are for me undeniably part of our future:
- genetic screening for employees
It's simple, there may be laws against it, there will be plenty of resistance, but in the end it will probably be allowed. Someone will use the 'think of the victims' argument. After a particularly bad 'employee going postal' episode and it will be argued that this could have been prevented with proper screening. Or it may start with certain high profile jobs only, and then slowly become acceptable practice elsewhere.
- genetic screening of children
Genomic optimization, or whatever you want to call it will be driven by alignment of two desires, first the desire or parents to have a 'perfect' child, second by society as a whole to improve life-span and to decrease the cost of medical care.
- ever more reliance on genetics in forensics
There is already quite a trend under way here, every year many more people are convicted because of genetic evidence, just like with fingerprints originally genetic evidence is by some considered to be infallible, but it has already been proven that that is not the case:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=lab-creates-fake-dna-evidence-2009-08-18
As for the tech in the movie it is almost but not quite here. There is a company in Switzerland that I had some brief contact with about a year ago that claims they can sequence a whole genome in under 10 days using a clever technique where they break up the DNA strings in much smaller segments than 'normal' (a few hundred basepairs, where 'normal' was more like 4000-10000 bp) and then analyze them in an on-chip laboratory.
The output of this process is an endless stream of jpegs of fluorescent segments that are then analyzed by a pipeline of clustered computers that piece together the original sequence by first pulling the short subsequences out of the jpegs, then matching up the overlaps.
Because of the shorter sequences the chemical step gets much shorter (< 1 hour) but the computational complexity of the problem gets much worse.
As computers get faster and are able to use ever shorter sequences without losing track of what goes where (the lower limit is somewhere around a few hundred base-pairs I believe) we'll probably see time on the order of a day within a decade.
The http://genomics.xprize.org/ bets that someone will be able to do 100 genomes in 10 days. The reason why that does not equate to a runtime of 1/10th of a day is because the process is heavily pipelined, so a lab throwing all its current resources at the problem for a single genome could already beat that number but that would not mean any significant improvement in technology.
To have a sustained output of one completed genome every 2.4 hours would be a pretty major breakthrough.
An all out effort would be limited by these steps that have to be run in sequence:
- the breaking up - amplification - photography - analysis - reassembly
Disclaimer: I'm not at all a professional in this field (though some days I wished I was!), just an interested lay person, chances are that some of the above is wrong or already outdated.
Gattaca is an underrated classic. Andre Niccol's other movie The Truman Show is even better.
Makes me think of Gattaca the movie.
Why not just link link our identities to DNA, thumb prints, and other unique features of us? You want to withdraw money? Scan your eye here. You would like to apply for a driver's license? Spit into this jar. Someone will contact you in a week (or however long it takes to process DNA samples).
That way, the shadow can never really be separated from the person (or at least the difficulty increases). BTW, I recommend watching the movie Gattaca for an interesting take on identity theft of the future, when people are engineered and DNA is checked everywhere you go.
Both of you should go watch Gattaca if you haven't already:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177
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