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Just because the benefits of sharing DNA data appear large, doesn't mean we should take potential drawbacks lightly. Imagine this: a future where a specific gen
by DecayingOrganic 3y ago
Just because the benefits of sharing DNA data appear large, doesn't mean we should take potential drawbacks lightly. Imagine this: a future where a specific gene is linked to hard work. Companies start screening job applicants based purely on their genetic makeup -- if you don't have the gene, you don't get the job. Or even more worryingly, imagine the government starts surveillance on a group of people with a particular gene, claiming they're more likely to commit a certain crime based on some obscure study. It would lead to moral and ethical havoc. DNA data might not seem worth protecting right now, but unchecked, the misuse could be catastrophic.
- AndrewThrowaway 3y agoMedical insurance - oh you have cancer/hear attack/etc gene. You premiums skyrocket. Job opportunities - oh so sorry you have bipolar gene... Dictator governments - oh your genes are shit so you are not allowed to have kids.
- seydor 3y agosue the first two, get $$$. This is textbook discrimination i avoid dictator governments , which do it anyway already, just based on phenotype
- squigz 3y agoDon't wanna live in a dictatorship? Just avoid it, simple!
- lopis 3y ago> sue the first two, get $$$. This is textbook discrimination 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.
- ekianjo 3y ago> i avoid dictator governments If you are born in one you cannot really escape thats kind of a big design feature you know
- blunder_chess 3y agoIn the United States, my understanding is that your medical & employment discrimination scenarios are already illegal due to the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
- lrvick 3y agoBecause large corporations have never broken laws before? Or bribed politicians to change them?
- eliasmacpherson 3y agostealing is illegal, so I never lock my front door.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoKeeps you from getting a broken window, so that’s probably not a bad idea. If they want in, a locked door isn’t stopping them.
- macNchz 3y ago> Or bribed politicians to change 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/hr1313-bill-genetic-information https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/13/14907250/h...
- leoedin 3y agoI don't think the first two are necessary a big deal in a western liberal democracy. We already have fairly strict legislation around data protection and selective hiring based on certain characteristics (like ethnicity - which is really just a much less accurate form of genetic classification). 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.
- concordDance 3y ago> Medical insurance - oh you have cancer/hear attack/etc gene. You premiums skyrocket. 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.
- ekianjo 3y ago> This is how insurance is supposed to work. It should reflect your actual risk levels. 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.
- _heimdall 3y agoI'm not sure that I follow. Whats wrong with insurance companies factoring in DNA markers to put people at risk of cancer or heart attack in a higher risk pool? 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.
- polygamous_bat 3y agoYou don’t even need DNA data do to that, just use race statistics to increase or decrease your premium! Or do you think that would be illegal?
- concordDance 3y agoCompanies use many forms of data to change premiums, many you don't have much control over (e.g. what area of the country you live in). Why is that wrong?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIn the US, it has been 13 years since the PPACA restricted premium pricing to only a handful of factors: https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums 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.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThe age one is completely insane considering the amount of unchecked age discrimination that American employers engage in. We decided to fire Bob because he’s 51 and it’s cheaper to employ a 27 year old. Oh Bob, sorry, BTW your market place plan is now also $1500 a month.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoBob, however, did not have to pay for older people’s healthcare during the 1990s and 2000s. 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.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoEveryone pays for everyone else’s healthcare, whether it be insurance pools, Medicaid, CHIPS, Medicare, etc. In America, we just do it in an especially dumb, cruel, and expensive way because it makes some assholes a lot of money.
- InitialLastName 3y ago(Potentially in some US states): Your biological material was found in the bio-waste can of a facility that was performing illegal gynecological operations. You're under arrest for the murder of a fetus.
- Symmetry 3y agoIn general, a person's performance in their job is the best evidence for their future performance, followed by tests you can give them, followed by their genes. That's not to say that there aren't pointy haired bosses who could be sold a load of snake oil on the subject but that's probably nowhere you'd want to work anyways. And with medicine pre-existing conditions are a much worse problem than genetics could ever be but thankfully in the US at least our existing laws seem to have that in hand.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoyou have genes for red hair, blue-ish green eyes, a facial structure that looks like X, or Y, and a skin tone of Z. 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.
- phero_cnstrcts 3y agoWith digital IDs becoming more integrated in daily life you would probably never even see the job posting.
- gurumeditations 3y agoA lot of places already decide gay people shouldn’t have kids. This is in democracies. Gene scenarios not needed. Only straight supremacy.
- seydor 3y agoWe already did these things, we discriminated against women, racial minorities, skin colors, and even more, religious minorities etc. We already have laws against these things, we never asked people to hide the color of their skin. 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.
- RHSeeger 3y ago> we never asked people to hide the color of their skin 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.
- hef19898 3y agoJust take all the criminal cases in which DNA was used to convict innocent people. Now imagine that with a DNS database in the background as huge as 23andMe. And of course selling DNA data was the idea from the get go...
- seydor 3y agoif there is more data, the dna identification will be more precise and correct also. Ideally i want this data to be open source, and thankfull you can download your data
- hef19898 3y agoYou are aware that Gathaca wasn't a blue print to follow, right?
- seydor 3y agomovies are not real life
- salawat 3y agoMovies by definition are not real life yet. 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.
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- sanatgersappa 3y agoOr they might develop a "cure" that gives you the hard work gene, or remove your crime gene...there are 2 ways of looking at this.
- panta 3y agoso that someone else can decide that if you don't have that hard work gene you are unhealthy and need to be "cured"? Nice dystopia.
- sojournerc 3y ago"Gattica" is a great movie that runs with this. The entire society is built on separation on DNA and designer genetics.
- tick_tock_tick 3y agoGattaca while a great movie always rubbed me wrong as at the end it turns out society was "right" and he probably 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.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoAlso a heart 10000 beats overdue is about 3 hours! Even a million beats is well under 2 weeks.
- renegade-otter 3y ago"The poors who somehow got into this fine dining establishment through all the obstacles we have carefully constructed are really ruining the vibe here!" 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!"
- vGPU 3y ago> his genetic profile indicates a high probability of several disorders and an estimated lifespan of 30.2 years. That seems to be a very valid reason to not send someone on a space mission.
- renegade-otter 3y agoAnd many people get well from placebo medication. We don’t fully understand human willpower and its ability to overcome the cards we were dealt at birth. The whole movie is literally about how genetics is not destiny.
- nintendo1889 3y agoThe German haplotype already has that. Just hire Germans for creative engineers or Asians for noncreative ones.
- concordDance 3y agoThe world is already GROSSLY, AWFULLY unfair due to genetics. This amount of unfairness is immensely larger than the amount that would be caused by genetic information being more widely available. Making genetic information more widely available has likely benefits far far larger than the costs.
- Podgajski 3y agoCan someone explain why they’re downing this? As Someone with schizoaffective bipolar disorder and Asperger’s, which is definitely affected by genetics because I seen in my genetics, I don’t see what the disagreement here is?
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoAsperger's syndrome is an advantage though, because it gives you a tendency to think accurately and practically.
- Podgajski 3y agoI agree, but the other behaviors and sensitivities I have made extremely difficult in my life not because I couldn’t handle it, but because other people couldn’t.
- ThrowAway1922A 3y agoAt the expense of relationships and the ability to form them. Being on the spectrum is not a good thing, it seriously messes up parts of your life.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoYou project, you need relationships with normies, not me. I can't have relationships with normies, and it's good, I don't miss them.
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- GuB-42 3y agoNow imagine a future where not only we are screening job applicants based on their genes, that police targets a specific genetic profile, but we also mark people with the "bad" genes so that anyone can recognize them. Some sort of color coding, like white for good, black for bad... 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.
- cbozeman 3y agoYou don't have to imagine it, it's 1997's Gattaca.
- GuB-42 3y agoGattaca 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.
- boppo1 3y ago>not already illegal in first world countries, I suspect the existing laws will soon be updated to reflect that once it starts being practical. I'm not so sure. Racism was shown to be completely unsupported by science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_statements_on_race?wprov=sfla1 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-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...
- bluefirebrand 3y agoYou 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca Pretty good movie from what I recall. Some good discussions around ethics that came out of it.
- salawat 3y agoI mean, everything poignant from my Ethics of Comp Sci has become status quo nowadays. 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.