Job opportunities - oh so sorry you have bipolar gene...
Dictator governments - oh your genes are shit so you are not allowed to have kids.
i avoid dictator governments , which do it anyway already, just based on phenotype
Ah but they did no wrong! They just licensed the AI du jur that functions pretty much like a black box, but just so happens to feed on multiple sources of data from dozens of data brokers. One of those brokers aggregates data from other brokers, including DNA data from DNA services.
Meanwhile, all the recruiter saw was "37% match" before reading your resume and moved on.
If you are born in one you cannot really escape thats kind of a big design feature you know
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
Or bribed politicians to change them?
If they want in, a locked door isn’t stopping them.
There was already an effort to weaken this law in 2017. It didn’t pass, but if corporations are lobbying for loopholes it would be entirely unsurprising to see some slip into future legislation. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/13/14907250/h...
There's a reason companies who require a physical or medical history (usually done to find pre existing conditions to protect against future workman's comp claims) do it after the job offer has been extended (it's risky to rescind an offer for no reason by the way) - if they did it before, every applicant with a disability (and their pro-bono lawyers taking a slam dunk case) who did not get the job would sue.
There might be a period where we haven't legislated against that sort of stuff. But once we do there's going to be a pretty big paper trail if a potential employer or insurance provider is searching a genetic database for you.
Dictators? Yes, they could do that. But they could already send you to the gulag because of how you look, who you're friends with, what you said in the pub etc. It's another tool in their arsenal maybe, but it's not like they don't have a lot anyway.
This is how insurance is supposed to work. It should reflect your actual risk levels.
Now, if what you actually want is socialised healthcare then implement that, trying to backdoor it via insurance gives you the worst of both worlds.
> Job opportunities - oh so sorry you have bipolar gene...
Then the company that looks at actual behavior rather than genes hires people slightly under market and makes bank. Then other companies start copying them.
Of course not. This is how perverse insurance works. Proper insurance systems work by pooling risks into large groups so that the few who are unlucky to have problems at a given point in time are covered.
The whole custom risk factor at the individual level is pure exploitation and a travesty of what insurance systems used to stand for.
That's not a custom risk factor at the individual level. Its just using data they believe indicates risk to decide what larger pool the person gets put into.
Now if you're asking me personally, I dislike the insurance industry in general. Insurance shouldn't be required, legally or otherwise. At that point insurance companies can use whatever data they want to price policies, as long as the terms are clear customers would actually have a choice whether they want insurance or not.
Are you talking private insurance or socialised risk mitigation?
The goal of private companies is to make profits. There is space and use cases for both models. Of course large private companies put efforts into making people believe that's not the case.
It's not always that clear e.g. genetic disposition to alcoholism is linked to actual alcoholism and related behaviours.
Is there a point of private health insurance?
Do you understand why discriminating job applicants based on race/sex is illegal but not based on GPA?
One is something you were born with. Another is something that you did.
Socialize medicine, please. A million dollars for a cancer treatment is insanity, when nearly 50% of the US population will get cancer at some point in their lives.
Nope, they should not. That's exactly the kind of things that ends up bringing prices up for everyone in the end.
Have you just described socialised healthcare?
No just regular insurance before insurance companies figured out they could make more profits by making individual customization, which should be completely forbidden by regulations in the first place.
Instead, it works by bucketing risk. In the simplest form, everyone is in one bucket, ignoring individual risk. That means that all other things being equal (e.g. size and value of your house), despite you have low risk of your house flooding, you would be paying exactly the same premium as the person who who has very high risk because their house is built on a flood plain.
Of course people paying more for their risk than it warrants may see that as unfair - so insurers use more buckets - e.g. bucketing high, medium and low risks.
But there's a delicate balance here - for instance, insurers may just decide not to insure the high-risk category. Or even if they do, the premiums may be unaffordable or the insurance benefits substantially restricted. And the natural extension of categorizing like this is to put an individual in a category by themselves - and then to limit payout. Essentially making the insurance not any better than a savings account, and probably worse if you don't claim at the beginning of the policy, before there's a large pot in the savings account.
From the point of view of perfect capitalists, the insurers would like to insure people with negligible risk, for high premiums, for low benefits - to make the most profit. From a social-good point of view, we would like insurers to cover risk that people cannot control (e.g. genetic risk) for reasonable premiums and good benefits. Categorizing lives somewhere between these two - a kind of necessary un/fairness.
You're using the wrong tool for the job there, if you want people to be supported regardless of their actual risk levels then you should get socialised medicine rather than artificially restricting what factors insurance companies can take into account (and there will be plenty of information leakage from due to other factors they are allowed to consider correlating with the banned ones).
I would not say that this is the 'worst of both worlds'. I actually think it has the best of both worlds, - namely coverage for everyone that needs it (benefit of social healthcare) and competition between insurance companies on price, convencience/reliability of apps, service, etc.
Is it assumed that premiums will rise? If you get a package of, say, pension plan your lower life expectancy might lower the premium?
I think this is why certain motorbike cover is actually lower..
This assumes the relation correlation between genes and adverse health outcomes are actually known. By definition that ignores personal behavior and epigenetics.
If an insurance becomes to specific to the individuals it stops spreading the risk.
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums
>Under the health care law, insurance companies can account for only 5 things when setting premiums.
>Age: Premiums can be up to 3 times higher for older people than for younger ones.
>Location: Where you live has a big effect on your premiums. Differences in competition, state and local rules, and cost of living account for this.
>Tobacco use: Insurers can charge tobacco users up to 50% more than those who don’t use tobacco.
>Individual vs. family enrollment: Insurers can charge more for a plan that also covers a spouse and/or dependents.
>Plan category: There are five plan categories – Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Catastrophic. The categories are based on how you and the plan share costs. Bronze plans usually have lower monthly premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs when you get care. Platinum plans usually have the highest premiums and lowest out-of-pocket costs.
Also, as an fyi, New York and Vermont do not allow age as a factor in pricing, and Massachusetts restricts the age rating factor to 2 instead of 3.
We is in quotes because various demographics/political tribes want to pass the hot potato.
The beauty of the health insurance system is it allows you to deliver differing qualities of healthcare to different voter groups.
For example, high voter participation groups like old people can get Medicare that pays providers more and hence more providers are available. And Medicaid for poor people on the other end that pays much less and has stricter rules on prior authorizations. And you can give Senators healthcare that pays providers more than other federal employees, and so on and so forth.
I actually find it impressive in some sense.
What magical event happens to people at age 30 that led the legislators to ban catastrophic? Would love to see the actuarial data on that. I have no knowledge/evidence of the reasoning but to me it definitely smells like lobbying.
[0] https://www.healthcare.gov/choose-a-plan/catastrophic-health...
Over 30 is likelier to be making more money and in jobs that do subsidize health insurance so they are likelier to buy it. And since the whole scheme is actually a mechanism to tax, you cannot let everyone opt out of the tax.
When governments restrict insurers underwriting criteria, they are providing a subsidy from one subset of the population to another. I think those are best accounted for as taxes and government benefits.
with a reasonable degree of accuracy you can then predict what that person looks like.
epigenetics and other factors make that something like a "best guess" approximation, but it is a good start.
What's problematic right now is that only law enforcment has unrestricted access to the dna data. I actually want such data to be open source.
We have a bunch of regulations around "you can't even ask the person about that", specifically because companies cannot be trusted not to discriminate based on it.
And of course selling DNA data was the idea from the get go...
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft design apply. If you want to have the biggest effect on how something shakes out become an artist.
And ideas have a flow. Nentally disturbed/child->Artist->Scientist/Engineer/Academic/Professional->Everybody else. Some other diversions may apply.
The mentally disturbed are the most sensitive to society at large's edge cases, but largely incomprehensible to everyone else due to divergent world view. The Artist breathes the surreal and unarticulated, in the practice of their work articulating that which defies the aggregate capability of the majority of society to manifest. That seeds the way for elucidation, exposition, and enumeration for the current flight of society's operant effectors, who implement it, which then trickles into the pool of common knowledge.
If you're seeing an artistic work in your life, and not keeping an eye out for it's implementations. You're running half-asleep to be frank.
Or
Just take all the criminal cases in which DNA was used to close cold cases.
The space mission may not be the perfect allegory, but that's just nitpicking. How many people watched Gattaca and thought, "Oh no! That crippled tool ruined the space mission! Not my tax dollars oh my stars!"
That seems to be a very valid reason to not send someone on a space mission.
Genetics may partly, or even significantly, be destiny.
Making genetic information more widely available has likely benefits far far larger than the costs.
Can I ask, what would be your ideas about how DNA information could be used? For example, shared with the person themselves, and no one else -- so they know what the reasons can be, for problems they run into later in life.
Or do you see any government agencies that it'd be good if they had access to the DNA info? The health care system maybe? (If they didn't share the data against ones will, say)
Yeah... see where I am going...
Gene-based discrimination is not new, in fact, it used to be the norm. Now, it is called racism, and we are actually in a much better situation than we once were. Not perfect of course, but we have laws in place to limit such abuse.
If discrimination based on "non color-coding" genes is not already illegal in first world countries, I suspect the existing laws will soon be updated to reflect that once it starts being practical. And I think it will be more readily enforced than for traditional racism. Racism is a natural, quasi-instinctive bias that you actually have to fight against, because there is no way you can ignore the skin tone of the person in front of you, but you can simply not use a genetic sequencing test. Plus it sounds like eugenics, something that became kind of unpopular since the 1940s.
I'm not so sure. Racism was shown to be completely unsupported by science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_statements_on_race?wpro...
There were a couple notable dissenters (some bigwig statistician iirc), but overall it was a clear consensus.
If it is shown that certain genes are causative of violent behavior, the legal situation might not shake out so cleanly. Already the debate has begun: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...
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.
Anyone can lose the genetic lottery (and everyone might lose it in some way). Even if you're considered fine by the genetic standards of the day, you can never be sure that your future kids or grandkids will be. Everyone will know someone, a close friend or family member, that's been negatively impacted by the laws so it's much harder to boogie man or "other" them.
Those laws would be wildly unpopular and would never survive in a democracy or even a populist dictatorship.
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.
Using computers to generate imagery that is then deployed duplicitously by the person who asked for profit? Yup.
Ubiquitous surveillance and geofencing? Yep.
Artificial constructs for remote deployment of lethal weaponry? Yup.
Poisoning of the well of knowledge to make it more likely that one particular source gets visited rather than another? Yep.
Attempts by monied interests to divest themselves from the implied responsibility to hire in society through increased mechanization? Yep.
To be frank, I'm starting to take Ethics courses as societal statements of intent nowadays.
And guess what, they got bought by MyHeritage
But we hardly need advanced DNA profiling to catch 99.9% of criminals (versus just standard DNA matching).
That's the sort of statement that seems plausible, and even intuitive, but probably needs a citation. It wouldn't wholly surprise me if it were true, though at moral and economic cost; but it would surprise me even less if it were false.
You didn't say "reduces the crime rate outside of prison." I assumed that's what you meant, but it's not clear that ignoring the crime rate inside prison is a reasonable statistic.
People in prison also, presumably, eventually get out, and a claim that prison officials can accurately deduce the likelihood of recidivism, and whether it has been decreased rather than increased by time in prison, is far from clear.
Finally, putting lots of people in prison has an effect on people outside of prison. For example, it is possible—though, again, I don't know; citations are needed—that high incarceration rates lead to more crime outside, since, if a member of a community has a good chance of going to prison whether or not they commit a crime, then prison can cease to have a meaningful deterrent effect in that community.
Im as anti-dna info-sharing as anybody, and I wont begiving 23andme a sample ever, but this is admitedly probably a pretty good thing. Even if it does ultimately serve to enrich some mega corps,consumers will probably get some amazing new treatments/therapies/medicines out of the deal.
There's something important there about the nature of the information economy but I can't fully get my mind around it.
People can use some external services like promethease. 23andme is likely to have more thorough data however.
DNA data is not worth protecting imho, and the benefits from their public use are very big. The DNA degrees-of-separation between any two humans is less than 3, so we are all traceable anyway already, and people should be aware of that. But the science/health benefits that can come out of this remain enormous.