It was a major can of worms when we started image recognition years ago. I think privacy will naturally continue to decrease if there's no regulation. More information is ammo for both good and bad applications. At first something like this could be used for affirmative action: airport security, seeking potential employees; anything where your appearance might be important. I think The West has more or less learned to ridicule the idea that "some people that naturally look a certain way should be treated a certain way". But yeah, if you're sweaty and shady at a presidential convention, it would be nice to have this kind of technology in place.

Apparently we can accurately determine a child is a psychopath from an extremely young age now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-...

There's no question that the next 20-30 years will be overflowing with cans of worms.

The next step after early (fetus or embryo stage) diagnosing of X thing, is that we're going to soon have the genetic alteration power to do something about it courtesy of CRISPR. It seems practically guaranteed that authoritarian societies will begin forcing parents to alter their unborn children to eliminate all sorts of attributes that are considered undesirable by whatever regime is in power.

Would you believe 20 months old? It seems preposterous but this one girl was pretty antisocial as a toddler. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-yo...

It won't take an authoritarian regime to force people to alter their embryonic children. I'm certain people will be willingly lining up at the clinics.

Heh, I'm.. wary of that, I guess? The people who alter their embryonic children during the first 100 years of that technology's existence - I assume - will mostly get a raw deal until embryonic alteration as a field goes through a billion 'Anna Karenina principle' failures.

We have the ability to adapt by simulating nature in our minds, and science too comes from this - but we are the result of so much time and such harsh filtering. In other words, I don't think we will see as much interest ten years into it after as we would during the first year.. we would only, in such little time, pick the low-hanging fruit changes. But these are also the ones nature has not propagated - which would be odd if they are both simplest to achieve (including my accidental mutation) and also known to be beneficial on average.

I'd imagine hypothetically that the first wave of children would start exhibiting genetic illnesses will drive down the willingness to sign children up, out of simple precaution that parents are unlikely to have ever seen evidence that the procedure does not have a risk of ruining the child's life.