The great thing about Gattaca is that the cinematography ages incredibly well on top of the amazing plot.
A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later. Gattaca chose to focus on the story and create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.
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.
The main reason director's cut is recommended for first-time viewers is theatrical version having an intro that reveals many elements. That said the list of all the differences is quite extensive: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/alternateversions/.
Interesting. Will definitely watch the director's cut.
I must say though that I don't think the opening monologue reveals too much. It reveals something but the city still feels weird, you don't truly understand the strangers' goals at the beginning, and there are still plot twists. If you don't even know about the strangers at the beginning, I wonder how the movie would play... a pity I cannot wipe my own memories and re-experience it ;)
A general rule of thumb that I've adopted is to intentionally skip the first 10 minutes of any movie.
This happened accidentally with Memento [0], it it became an incredible film. Without all that setup in the first scene, you exist with the protagonist as he discovers his world.
I've tried it with other films and they give away too much information, you the viewer are practically handed the whole script.
"The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content."
I don't quite think the UI_at_80x24 constant has the same ring to it.
I think skipping the beginning of Memento is a mistake. It's a powerful beginning that sets up expectations (the movie is "pre ordained", but we just don't understand why) but at the same time it explains nothing.
In general, I disagree with your rule of thumb. My favorite movies have cool beginnings, and it'd be a shame to miss them.
I think it does change Memento... for the worse. The beginning is a powerful, integral part of the movie.
Skipping the first 10 minutes is like skipping the last 10, "I just know where this is going anyway". Nope. So much can happen in 10 minutes! Plus, you know, they filmed that part for a reason.
It's also like skipping the first chapter of a book: sure, some books would be improved by trimming their clumsy beginnings, but good books aren't.
I observed a similar effect with University lectures: being there from the start I often lost myself in some embarrassing state of deep distraction, but when I missed the beginning I went into attentive panic to make up for what I missed that echoed on even after I fetched up.
The difference between university lectures and movies is, of course, that one is not normally trying to derive a lesson from a movie; there's nothing to "optimize". Every part of the movie is necessary unlike a lesson.
In the past, I used to rent DVDs for director’s cut where the director explains the scenes. Do we still have rental services where we can get director’s cut DVDs?
Arguably, the theatrical version of Blade Runner is better for first-time viewers, because the voiceover explains a lot of stuff they don't understand.
Fans almost always say they prefer the DC (or actually the "Final Cut"), but my theory is that their opinion isn't really valid because they all saw the theatrical version first, so upon viewing the later cuts, they had the benefit of already knowing the story and background, and of course they can't just forget that when watching a voiceover-less cut.
I'm not one of those who saw the theatrical version. I didn't see the movie until much later in my life. I think actually read an article about how the "Final Cut" is Ridley Scott's "true vision" for the film before I actually saw it. That prompted me to go track it down and watch it for the first time with that version.
So, I've never actually seen the theatrical version with the voiceover. However, I don't believe there's anything in the film that I don't understand. I understood the symbolism and the message that was being conveyed. I'm being deliberately vague here because I don't want to spoil it for any random reader who might see this.
I don't think there's anything particularly difficult to understand about the film. Perhaps you think I am giving people too much credit? I don't think I am. There are lots of films out there with deeper meanings and hidden ideas/messages. There are lots of very critical viewers out there who pay attention and don't need everything spelled out for them. These are also the people most likely to get annoyed when a voiceover spoils it for them.
I had no idea about the Kieslowski connection, wow. I follow his other great collaborator, composer Zbigniew Preisner, where if you take anyone involved with Kieslowski chances are it's going to be a good film. I have his tri coleurs and decalogue on dvd, and double vie on vhs in a box somewhere. Strange to think when these things were artifacts now that nothing is, and that they could even be somewhat rare. I have the original House of Cards series on dvd in that box, The Big Sleep and other classics as well.
Generally, movies that focus on set design age much better than movies that focus on effects. If you make a good set, it will look good no matter how technically advanced your setup is. It may look better when filmed using the latest cameras, but it will never look wrong when it isn't, because it is the real thing. Effects are not the real thing, and as technology improved people have gotten better at noticing and are less tolerant of the details that make it look fake, that's what makes them look dated.
If the plot is good, then dated effects don't matter. Both the 1916 and 1954 versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea hold up today.
I guess some people just can't cope with anything but the most cutting edge effects. If they notice something is fake the movie experience is ruined for them or something. I'm glad I'm not afflicted with this.
It’s not a problem as long as the experience is consistent. If you have an otherwise beautiful movie that suddenly comes out with a terrible effect they would have been better off without it.
Eh, that can be good still. Terminator 1 has the shitty stop motion fully metal terminator at the end, but if you consider the impact that the poor technology had on the movie as a whole, they were essentially forced to leave it to the end because of the low quality. It was a good creative constraint, which served to draw out the tension by only progressively revealing the true nature of the thing, which also concealed how it might be beaten. It also didn’t matter too much because the audience already understood how scary it was by the time the effect came on, so we were able to suspend disbelief easily, and if you watch the movie start to finish for the first time today, it’d be the same. The pacing ended up being incredibly good. Would they have hit that with better effects? Still possible, less likely.
it's why I think the Farscape puppets were absolutely genius. They look so timeless compared to a lot of the heavy CGI use during that era of TV sci-fi.
I like Farscape very much, but, to be fair, the really good episodes were few and far between. You had to slog through a lot of sub-par episodes, and people can be forgiven for not really taking to it because of that.
It's really a shame that Farscape didn't have stronger writing because the whole puppets and minimal effects thing works pretty well. (I can forgive Season 1 a bit as the actors and the writers were still figuring out the characters. Season 2 and forward sub-par episodes were all on the writers.)
However, as I understand it, the problem with the puppets is that they are expensive.
For how bad much of the computer imagery has changed, the overall bridge sets in the TOS films look a -lot- better to me than all of the fancy CGI stuff.
All of that said...
There's a certain correctness in my head to the idea that in a pre-replicator future [0], it would be more smart to use a bunch of physical buttons and CRT type monitors.
The main reason that comes to mind, is that a simple CRT is probably easier to fabricate on a deep space mission than a flat screen, if it needs replacement. Similar for all the buttons/lights/switches.
Now, it wouldn't necessarily be -easy- for a ship in deep space to re-fab these components. Thus the need for 'low-fi' graphics, since you might be in a region where the best your folks can fab is NTSC-quality.
[0] - While TOS had food synthesizers, that seems like a subset of a full replicator's functionality.
Keep in mind people originally watching TOS were likely doing so on black and white TVs with a 10"-13" screen ten feet away. The sets looked no worse than Forbidden Planet, a theatrical release from a decade prior.
Modern high definition scans of the original film looks hilariously bad on modern TVs. It looked far less bad on TVs contemporary with the original broadcasts.
Actually, many people then were getting color TVs. The reason the sets on ST:TOS were so colorful was to attract viewers who had spent a bunch of money for a new color TV set, and wanted to see things in vivid colors.
The modern HD scans of the original film look fantastic. They do, however, show how low-budget the sets were, but the detail of the original film is quite amazing, and these old shows look far better than most stuff produced in the 1990s which was done using videotape.
The best episode of Star Trek, City on the Edge of Forever, holds up today because of its story and its period sets and costumes, not its sci-fi stuff.
I totally, 100% agree. Gattaca is amazing, and my all time favorite Blade Runner also has outstanding practical effects (flawed, sure, but you stop noticing soon enough).
One of my favorites that, while very cool in general, suffers from some dodgy effects is Aliens. In general I wouldn't change a bit from it, but some of the dropship scenes are terrible and were pretty bad even back then.
Then again, be careful what you (um, I) wish for: if they were to touch up Aliens they wouldn't stop at the dropship and they would ruin it with unnecessary CGI.
I noticed those dropship scenes on a rewatch a couple of years ago. I think when I watched it as a kid it was on a CRT on cable television and you couldn't see the details as much. Plus, I was a kid.
On that note, I just rewatched the original Alien and there's really only one or two shots that looks kind of bad or goofy. Holds up so well for a film from 1979 with what would be a lower range budget in today's money ($44M).
Yes, and also: imagine Alien in the hands of a director with access to today's budget and CGI: it would completely ditch any ambience, pace and characterizations in favor of showing one -- nay, thousands -- of monsters and chase scenes.
This is exactly why I hated the last half of Will Smith’s I Am Legend. The first half did so well at showing a post apocalypse, and the last half ruined everything with CGI video game monsters. They also butchered the main plot.
"Ripley, you've blown the transaxle! You're just grinding metal!"
what transaxle? M577 APC would have to have 4 independent hub motors, or else be a Tardis :) Besides who cares if you blew a motor if the thing still moves, and why abandon mobile safe house other than to segue into terrible dropship scene ;-)
To be fair, even if they had consulted mechanical and automotive engineers in 1985, I'm not sure those engineers would have had enough foresight to predict this. But then again, I think extremely large construction equipment has used hybrid-electric/diesel drives with independent wheel motors for a long time.
Its a case of "your holding it wrong". These movies (blade runner/etc) should come with screen calibrations to assure that people don't have the brightness on their TV's turned up too high. A problem that is far to prevalent, along with having the contrast set at cartoon levels to make them pop.
These old movies were _DARK_. For long stretches you could barely see anything much less all the details of the ships. I read/watched an interview with H.R. Giger many years ago, where he talks about how he created fear in his movies by barely showing anything and letting the mind fill in the horrible details.
So, if you can see the details of the drop ship beyond what is being directly lit by the landing lights/etc then your TV needs to be seriously adjusted. Same for the alien itself, it should only barely be visible. And for a movie like Alien this makes sense, between being in the depths of space, or below heavy/dark cloud cover there shouldn't be a lot of light, particularly ambient light.
Agreed in general but do note the dropship scene is not particularly dark. The dropship is going through the clouds and the "superimposed" image is pretty bad. I'm pretty sure Cameron cringes nowadays when he looks at it.
Do note most of the other Aliens SFX stood the test of time very well, and of course, it's a Well made movie with awesome pacing, making it easy to forgive those few effects that aren't very good.
Yah I re-watched it after posting that comment, and I think i conflated it with the landing in the original.
But even so, with the brightness on my 10" tablet turned down most of the way it didn't look too bad, some of the dialog though.. guess i've outgrown that kind of stuff.. lol.
> These movies (blade runner/etc) should come with screen calibrations to assure that people don't have the brightness on their TV's turned up too high. A problem that is far to prevalent, along with having the contrast set at cartoon levels to make them pop.
You don't need a hardware calibrator for controlling brightness. Just enable Filmmaker mode and disable everything else like "dynamic contrast", all kinds of motion interpolation, etc.
I was thinking more like those "alpha channel" screen calibrators that lots of games had. Adjust the contrast until the top bar looks to be the same brightness as the bottom bar, then you get another screen where you adjust the brightness until a gray bar is just barely visible.
But yah film modes help with this as long as all the fancy stuff can be disabled. OTOH, I actually like having some basic motion/frame interpolation enabled, because 24FPS drives me almost as crazy as bad 3:2 pull down encoded (or not encoded) streams where slow motion pans/etc are jerky. I guess some of these TV's have a black frame insertion mode (or its part of the film mode) where it drops black frames between 24 FPS content and that helps too.
I am curious about this H.R. Giger interview. I am unaware of him making any movies though your wording could just be confusing. Did you mean 'created fear in the the elements of the movies he contributed to' or did you really mean 'created fear in his movies'?
He was part of the special effects team for Alien.
I'm not sure where/what interview it was, may have been some commentary on the movie I remember it from many years ago.. But i'm 99% sure the interview was about the special effects in Alien, and how he intentionally kept the alien mostly hidden. Google yields a lot of results but I'm not going to watch all of them for you :)
Anyway, I so I guess he "contributed" the fear since he wasn't the director.
>Then again, be careful what you (um, I) wish for: if they were to touch up Aliens they wouldn't stop at the dropship and they would ruin it with unnecessary CGI.
I don't think this is fair. Not every director is George Lucas or wants to be like him.
Scott has shown that he's only as good as the script he's given. Give him a great script, you get a great movie. Give him a shitty script, you get a beautiful movie with a shitty plot. He seems to have no ability to judge script quality.
I was watching an Industrial Light And Magic documentary on Disney+ and it had Spielberg talking about the transition to digital, and he goes out of his way to make the point that effects are great but if you're not presenting it right and telling a story that is worthwhile the film just won't last.
Last time I watch Terminator 2, I stopped frame by frame during the mall shooting scene, and I realized how cheap some effects were, but how editing made it subtly perfect. It just conveys the blow to represent the T1000 liquid metal visually. No need to do more.
I think today's era is obese.. too much power, too available .. no constraint.. the movie gets lost in the technology.
In the ILM documentary, they talked about T2, and how they could do some amazing new effects, but they could not do a large volume of them due to the complexity. They were very careful about how they used their resources.
They had a surprisingly short amount of high end effects time in that film…but it doesn’t feel like it. Th film moves very fluidly and the effects blend from one to another without being jarring.
I know exactly which scene you’re talking about and I haven’t seen that movie in decades. I thought the point was to subvert audience expectations though. Cameron would have the first real SFX on screen be practical so that you think you’re going to see something fairly run-of-the-mill. Then, the shrapnel shrinks digitally and you realize T2 is like nothing you’ve seen.
I believe there is one shot in the final steelworks where Arnie is wrestling with a guy wrapped in tinfoil. But it's quick, not obvious and you just accept it as part of "metal dude killing people". It's only in freeze frame that you go - oh yeah.
> A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later.
I, for one, enjoy low-budget scifi very much. Crappy CGI has it's charm but CGI aside, I have the feeling that actors in lower-budget shows were more involved than those in shows written to be ratings winners.
It's kind of like with websites created with passion and websites created for SEO.
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.
It makes Hanna-Barbera cartoons look like Disney-quality works in comparison. The lips made me cringe back when I was a kid watching reruns of the show.
Particularly when the supposedly futurist technology has already become obsolete since (CRT screens, rudimentary 3d animations, lack of portable communication, absence of networks, etc).
Also lots of sci-fi movies underestimate how much will not change, we live today with 200yo buildings, our cities won't look that different in 200 years.
> Also lots of sci-fi movies underestimate how much will not change
My favorite detail of the Battlestar Galactica reboot was how normal it all felt. For the most part your only clue that it’s The Future was that every rectangle had chopped off corners to become an octagon.
They even found a clever plot-driven reason for why that’s the case. Loved it.
BSG wasn't in the future, it was in the distant past. The people there were the distant ancestors of modern humans (in combination with humans who evolved here on Earth separately from the colonists, and were magically genetically compatible, apparently due to likely divine intervention according to the characters).
So some technologies were more advanced than ours, but other technologies were very much not (such as cassette recorders, radio, etc.).
Yeah that ending always felt flabby to me. 4 seasons of futuristic space-faring humans with FTL jumps fighting a war with super advanced AI cyborgs … psyche, joke’s on you viewer, this is actually 100,000+ years ago. Worst part of the whole show
I don't see how it could have been handled any other way, given the mythology of the show (that there was a 13th lost colony called "Earth", that everyone had heard of).
Well, I live in Copenhagen, in a brick building that is some 130 years old, like most of the buildings around here. Reinforced concrete has arrived, and most new buildings are built with it. I guess when the next level of super-concrete comes, we will start building with it, but old buildings will still stand for 50-100 years.
I instantly loved this film the moment I saw vintage cars with futuristic engine sounds. Simple genius.
Compared this to an example such as Total Recall, where cars were designed to look futuristic. Looked great when the film was released, but terribly dated now. It affects the re-watchability for me.
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”.
Did you find a very skewed sex ratio in your embryos?
My dad has a sister, but has only two sons. My brother has 3 sons and one daughter, all natural pregnancies. My wife and I have 1 son via IVF, and the other 4 embryos we had checked for chromosomal abnormalities happened to all be male.
I am aware that some IVF processes can inadvertently introduce a sex bias by exacerbating the tiny speed advantage the lighter Y chromosome gives sperm.
I'm curious (and will never know) how much of the skewed sex ratio of my embryos is due to randomness, how much is due to IVF processes, and how much might be due to some familial abnormality.
We did. The majority were female embryos. I mentioned report cards, we had 5 embryo's with grade A, 1 of which was male. We had a similar prevalence for female with lower grades as well, though there were 2 or 3 males each in the lower grades.
There are some harmful genetic mutations that associate with particular sex chromosomes. I wonder if ease of detection in some varieties of abnormality may play an inadvertent role too.
I'm always confused. The NWO conspiracy people say that gene editing will be prohibitively expensive (like owning a yacht is), but the real life examples I see don't seem that way. What are some good examples of services that could be done cheaply but are intentionally made expensive for the sake of exclusion?
> but the real life examples I see don't seem that way.
In what situation would removing an egg, fertilizing it, altering its genetic sequence, and them implanting the embryo into a person be consider cheap?
Looks like IVF costs around $12,000 today. Considering that this is for your own child, I bet it would be one of the least expensive parts of raising them. I also expect it would become very cheap after it went mainstream.
> The Human Genome Project was the international research effort to determine the DNA sequence of the entire human genome. It took 13 years and was published in 2003, with an estimated cost of over $300 million. Today, a whole human genome can be sequenced in one day for under $1000.
$12,000 is more than the average yearly income for a person on this planet. The USA has only 300 million or so people in it. What are the chances you are born in a place where $12,000 is considered 'the least expensive parts of raising a child'?
A mobile phone can be mass produced based on one design. This is not the case with removing eggs and doing custom gene work on them, incubating them, and implanting them in a person. You are making an invalid comparison. There are no 'economies of scale' with individual procedures.
One interesting balancing thing though is that because people who do IVF tend to be older / have more high risk pregnancies, you’re more likely to have issues there.
Eugenism is inevitable. You can't stop parents trying to get the best life for their children, that's pretty much their top priority. We don't like to frame it that way but we are already there with pre-natal tests. Even the selection of mating partner is a form of eugenics. College graduates only marrying college graduates, repeat that for many generations and it is bound to have an effect.
One of the major problems with eugenics highlighted in Gattaca is that it was used to artificially pre-select who was allowed to compete and who wasn't.
> "Even the selection of mating partner is a form of eugenics."
Only when the selection is done by those who aren't the two partners (e.g. arranged marriages, theoretically rape in the absence of abortion). Otherwise it's natural selection between partners - there's no guarantee the aspects two people find attractive in each other are genetically heritable.
> "College graduates only marrying college graduates, repeat that for many generations and it is bound to have an effect."
Assortative mating per se isn't necessarily eugenics. It takes an instruction from the outside on what mating partners should consider attractive in a potential mate. Without this instruction people will find a variety of differing, and even mutually exclusive, traits attractive, and will assort on these variety of traits, not on a hierarchy of traits.
"Eugenicists realized that assortative mating did not always produce the best offspring, so sought ways to popularize what they considered to be good marriages. Francis Galton urged the brightest and the healthiest individuals to marry each other. He found an ideal situation in German university professors <emphasis mine> (then all male) who tended to marry the daughters of professors or their female graduate students <emphasis mine>. This positive expression of eugenics encouraged the selection of good mates through popular health books and Fitter Families Contests held at state fairs. The training of field workers at the Eugenics Record Office included exercises to help them analyze mate preferences and make better eugenic choices."
> there's no guarantee the aspects two people find attractive in each other are genetically heritable.
Evolution naturally tends in that direction.
> Assortative mating per se isn't necessarily eugenics. It takes an instruction from the outside on what mating partners should consider attractive in a potential mate. Without this instruction people will find a variety of differing, and even mutually exclusive, traits attractive, and will assort on these variety of traits, not on a hierarchy of traits.
Up to a point. There's still a pretty strong correlation between what different people find attractive, and there are certainly things that almost everyone agrees are unattractive.
A lot of what people find attractive about each other are personalities (and only some traits are heritable, not entire types), and artifacts of how people were raised or adapted to how they were raised.
> Up to a point. There's still a pretty strong correlation between what different people find attractive, and there are certainly things that almost everyone agrees are unattractive.
Of course, though moreso the latter. Eugenics, as a term, to have meaning, is an extreme of breeding behavior. It isn't just regular assortative mating among local populations.
> Of course, though moreso the latter. Eugenics, as a term, to have meaning, is an extreme of breeding behavior. It isn't just regular assortative mating among local populations.
> Eugenics, as a term, to have meaning, is an extreme of breeding behavior. It isn't just regular assortative mating among local populations.
That's circular logic. The whole point of the argument is that eugenics (as it is normally understood) is of a piece with regular assortive mating; people look for good aspects in a partner all the time, and there's no clear sharp line between that and what we normally call eugenics.
i think eugenics has to have an external influence on the mating choice, rather than just pure self-selection (this external influence might be inorganic, like propaganda, or an actual director choosing the mates).
It's a spectrum as well - not a binary choice. Some cultures prefer their children to marry within culture, and this expectation is set by the parents/grandparents etc; i consider this a form of eugenics, albeit mild and likely not harmful.
> It's a spectrum as well - not a binary choice. Some cultures prefer their children to marry within culture, and this expectation is set by the parents/grandparents etc; i consider this a form of eugenics, albeit mild and likely not harmful.
That's more a case of dysgenics; it reduces genetic diversity which tends to make it easier for hereditary diseases etc. to appear (particularly if it results in a small dating pool e.g. immigrant communities in second countries). My back-of-the-envelope guess is that that tendency is probably doing more direct harm than anything else we might worry about (e.g. class segregation).
> The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”
Eugenics is a societal phenomenon. Which is why arranged marriages belong in the eugenics camp. Assortative mating from free choice is not eugenics, regardless of the outcome over many generations.
I think it's the opposite. In an arranged marriage the spouses are selected by their family irrespective of the merits of the kids involved. Free choice means you will select the spouse based on the merit of the spouse. I think it's much more likely to lead to gene selection.
If beautiful people marry beautiful people and ugly people marry ugly people, you effectively get a sort of breeding (I know we don't like to use these animal terms but that's kind of what it is). Now you can refuse to call a natural preference "eugenics" but the reality is that you are still expressing a preference for some characters that you think are desirable and your progeniture is likely to inherit some of those characters.
This was of course a lot less prevalent in a society that lived in small villages with very little mobility (and therefore very little mating choice), which is why I think it's a process that only kicked in at the XX century. My guess is that we will see the effect in this century. Works with dogs, should work with humans.
Everything you say makes sense, but none of it has to do with eugenics. It has to do with assortative mating. Eugenics is about socially driven desirable trait selection (where a trait can be what kind of family you come from). The social is the most important part. Not the trait selection.
Individual trait selection allows a multitude of traits to thrive. Social trait selection tends not to.
Assortative in biological terms pertains to some biological traits. However, people more often assortative mate within thier social group. So you get an intersection of both but with the social factor vastly enhanced compared to biological.
You cannot easily have children with someone you never met, after all, barring IVF with an unknown donor.
When people talk about eugenics, they're usually talking about forced sterilization of people. If "selecting better genes fir offspring" is categorized as eugenics, then animals and humans alike have been practicing eugenics for millions or even billions of years. Sexual attraction is all about selecting the fittest mate that provides the best genes for one's offspring. For more complex species there more to it: mates may be selected based on likelihood of investing resources in offspring. But selecting good genes is a big part of sexual attraction.
> College graduates only marrying college graduates, repeat that for many generations and it is bound to have an effect.
I think there's enough infidelity around to cancel out this effect. You have around a million n*great grandparents at n=20. How many of those are likely fathered by "somebody else"? And that's just at n=20; evolution runs much slower than that. Even with perfect class-based marriage, good genes have inevitably worked their way across the social ladder through infidelity by now. "Bad" inbred lines only exist as lines; when measuring the total effect, illegitimate children need to be included, but of course they are invisible.
I don't think it's inevitable. If anything, eugenics has been disproven on many levels as a viable model. You can't infer the future from just a set of genes and trying to simulate their expression as there's just too many unknowns in our environment which leave doubt to the probable outcomes of any organism, human or otherwise. The key issue with Eugenics is its belief in a clockwork view of genetics which today has been disproven in the last 30 years. Life ain't a clockwork, it's a chaotic system.
In the future the state will collect sperm and eggs from all citizens, and implant random embryos into women who want children. Natural conception will be shunned like arranged marriages today.
There will be women employed by the state whose job will be carrying the embryos for people who don't want to do it themselves. One could argue that the majority of people will choose this option, since a qualified state clerk would likely be safer for the embryo than doing it the DIY way.
This will be of course only a stopgap measure until artificial wombs become readily available.
They can try, but over time reversion to the mean wipes it away. Inevitably the family will not produce the smartest or best looking or whatever other quality they have selected for.
I keep thinking about eugenics, how can we have eugenics without resorting to genocide or ending up with a dystopia, like in Gattaca? Should we even strive to get eugenics, why bother? Where does diversity become detrimental to success for an individual? The clone of a perfect individual will always perform better than the peers, except when we need adaptation and flexibility. Will we get to a society where just some parents agree to alter the genes of their offspring like in Gattaca, for some very niche job opportunities? What happens when it goes wrong, can the child sue the parent?
I am not sure why you would associate eugenics with genocide. As the article mentions, today you can promote or suppress a gene by simply patching the genome.
And frankly I am not sure which is more dystopian: a future where none of the kids are born with genetic diseases, predisposition to be obese, or simply stupid or ugly, vs the present where a kid has to live with those things he can do nothing about.
> a future where none of the kids are born with genetic diseases, predisposition to be obese, or simply stupid or ugly
But we're all defective today, one way or another. It's incredibly rare for someone to be "perfect" genetically speaking, and a lot of those people will have a bad upbringing or something else to hold them back. It's true that being beautiful and above average smart will get you through life so much easier though.
Anyway, have you seem Gattaca? It shows how this can become dystopian very quickly.
Also, if we weed out "bad genes", we might get a surprise down the line, where those gene were actually essential for out survival as a species, and we might be wiped out by a pandemic or something similar.
Yeah, I dunno, eugenics is hard, ethically speaking. Yes, I would have liked to be beautiful...who wouldn't ?
>Anyway, have you seem Gattaca? It shows how this can become dystopian very quickly.
The main problem in Gattaca wasn't that some people were genetically superior, it was that they were marked as superior and others were discriminated against.
I think another way of looking at it is that it showed that people who were handicapped by their parents' poor decisions had a harder time in life. For a modern-day parallel, look at parents who won't allow their kids to get vaccinated, and those unfortunate kids end up with diseases like measles or polio.
They had the whole passport system with "valids" and "invalids", and Vincent eventually achieved his goal. I don't think what your saying was the main point of the show.
No, I'm just presenting an alternate point of view, that of the people in the movie who supported the system in place.
However, one objective fault I see in the movie (from what I remember, it's been many years) is that their "valids/invalids" system assumes that non-GE people are automatically inferior, which may not be the case (and also depends on the task/role). Even today, some people obviously won the "genetic lottery" (like Michael Phelps, who's obviously genetically optimized for swimming compared to most humans, though this doesn't make him good at other things), while others clearly lost.
Another thing I just thought of with my Michael Phelps example: genetically engineering people isn't necessarily going to make them superpeople, so I wonder how this will be handled. Phelps is really good at swimming with his body type, but that same body type probably means he's also really bad at other sports, such as weightlifting or cycling. Different body types are better optimized for different activities. Currently, people just get lucky usually, born with physical attributes that make them good at those tasks. So you don't see any pro cyclists that look like the "The Mountain" guy from Game of Thrones, for instance (whereas that guy is really good at weightlifting).
>that same body type probably means he's also really bad at other sports, such as weightlifting or cycling
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I'm sure Phelps could lift more and cycle faster/further than most people on earth.
If anything, the fact he's good at swimming means it's likely that he's also really good at other sports - just like someone good at one sort of cognitive task is probably good at most.
I disagree. Sure, he's probably better at those sports than "most people", but that's not important, it's whether he can compete at an Olympic level in those sports. I'm sure he can't. He's optimized for world-class performance in just one sport, but not likely to be able to excel (at that level) in many others, no matter how much he trains.
I can cycle faster and farther than most people on Earth too. That doesn't mean I can compete at a pro level, or worse an Olympic level. I'm nowhere near that level of performance; the bar for "most people on Earth" just isn't very high for most sports, in fact it's pathetically low. Most people are laughably bad at any sport.
Honestly, I was trying to play devil's advocate in a way. In that reality, most of society had decided that getting their kids genetically engineered (GE) was the correct choice: we have the technology, so why not use it? I see it as somewhat similar to medical technologies we have today, like vaccinations, with a small number of people refusing them because "they're not natural" or whatever. Most people prefer to have a society where polio and smallpox are eradicated instead of normally-occurring, so vaccinations are generally required in most places. So in the future, would having your kids GE'ed be seen the same way? For low-hanging fruit, what if your kid has sickle-cell anemia or MS or some other obvious genetic defect, and a simple tweak can fix this and keep them from being condemned to a lifetime of health problems and an early death? Why wouldn't we avail ourselves of this, and what parent would want their kid to suffer with these things? But with GE technology, obviously we can go much farther than just fixing a few transcription errors that have devastating consequences, so where does that lead us as a society? I do find this question really fascinating.
Oh, of course. If it were possible to actually do it, then it wouldn't ever be possible to contain. Either a small selection of elites get access to the tech and use it to dominate all of society, or we all have it. I don't think you could put the genie back in the bottle once it's possible to make your children smarter, stronger and more successful.
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?
> It's incredibly rare for someone to be "perfect" genetically speaking
its actually impossible because the only objective measure of gene quality is the performance of the organism and the performance of the organism depends on the environment.
Chemistry gets like a trillion plus points for the benefits it's bright and a few hundred million minus pounds for the harm it's caused. And indeed, for some people the term "chemical" is automatically something bad (they don't appreciate it if you point out water is a chemical, and not only because there's an implied "artificial" in its usage).
Eugenics… well, we can see the theoretical benefits of things like ending sickle cell anaemia outside malarial regions, but we're starting from really huge negative points because it turned out that racist people found it to be a really convenient justification for genocide, and sadly genocides get attempted so often[0] that it's probably not going to be possible to dissociate the two.
But it does show that it can br used in a bad way or or a bad cause. Someone asked why genocide was mentioned. History supports caution on that front, just as it does for chemistry.
Eugenics is a comforting story the middle classes tell themselves feel better about being ruled by liars and swindlers. If you want the best life for your children teach them to be selectively sociopathic without a shred of decency. One day they can be the next Obama or Trump. Or Gates. Or Musk.
One thing I don't understand about the movie, even after reading the screenplay etc. is why does Vincent claim the doctors knew the exact time of his death just seconds after he was born? They clearly don't and can't, given the entire rest of the movie. Are the doctors just reading out the exact middle of the probability distribution (or the time with the absolute highest probability), to way more precision than actually makes sense? On another note, I'm not sure the probability curve would actually only have one peak in Vincent's case, one peak from his heart condition and another from old age would make sense. The doctors/his parents should have explained the nature of the probability distribution in much more detail.
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.
> Are the doctors just reading out the exact middle of the probability distribution
The movie was very explicit about reading out high probabilities for Vincent's problems. So they're not certainties, but they are treated as such by the wider society which is why he narrated it as if it was a certainty.
the doctors were also salesmen. There is a scene where they are pitching the various options and pushing for the more expensive. I would assume that a majority of what they say is just dishonest attempts to make the parents feel bad about not optimizing their child. They are presenting the worst case scenario as fact.
I always took it as implied that, although the 99% chance was their real knowledge of the distribution, this was a story about the one guy that ended up flying to space.
He does not actually fly to space in-movie, and from what I recall, it seems entirely plausible that he'll have a heart attack and die during the first flight. With all the implications that has for the rest of the team.
The movie features the moment of ignition, as a counter-point to Jerome incinerating himself, so we see Vincent is going into space, I guess it's conceivable that for some reason his heart fails shortly after the movie ends but you could say that about any movie. Maybe right after he leaves, Truman drops dead of a heart attack in The Truman Show?
>> The doctors/his parents should have explained the nature of the probability distribution in much more detail.
It may be a movie based in science and still relevant, but it is still first and primarily a movie for entertainment. Add in the fact that "doctors knew the exact time of his death just seconds after he was born" can be interpreted as how long his body will last, not predicting the future, and I'm not sure your request for explaining the math behind this statement would contribute much to the movie.
>> an be interpreted as how long his body will last
How would you know that either, even with perfect interpretation of a full DNA sequence and NMRI scans? Let's say to simplify you knew the exact total number of heartbeats his heart could handle before instantly conking out (obviously not a real thing). There would still be a probability distribution, and possibly not a simple one at that, based on how much physical activity he does, when and how often he gets sick from viral infections, etc. Really anything that impacts his heart rate at the time.
Also because how would they know a medical treatment wouldn’t become available to allow Vincent the likelihood of a longer life? Maybe society has stopped advancing because of their deterministic outlook?
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.
Problem is genetics is messy as the article states, and we have a long way to go to unentangle the role the environment plays, plus there are always unpredictable environmental factors. There’s also the possibility of negative side effects to certain genetic advantages. You might predispose your child to being a genius and mentally ill.
I don’t think the movie’s caste system is realistic, because the role of genes isn’t that deterministic. There would be too many exceptions like Ethan Hawke and Jude Law’s characters.
>I don’t think the movie’s caste system is realistic, because the role of genes isn’t that deterministic.
When your entire society is structured around covertly filtering out people with the wrong genes, you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Natural-born people can't succeed because they've been predicted they won't succeed, and engineered people succeed because they've been predicted they will succeed. I'm not even saying this happens because someone wants it to happen like this to maintain the status quo. It can happen because your peers push you in a direction that aligns with society.
Also, if you think about it, the movie never directly states that engineered people are actually "better". Sure, they're on average taller, with perfect eyesight, and with the lowest chance of developing certain conditions, but they're not necessarily smarter or stronger; they're just as smart or as strong as they could have been given their parents. The space program was filled with "the best", but we don't actually know if it would have operated worse with a mixer personnel, that's just what the administration believed.
As a society we've been doing this forever. People are already separated by their visible traits (skin color, hair color, sex), however, now we can separate people by invisible traits (penchant for disease, carriers of deficiencies, etc.). The end game here will be mandated genetic tests for a host of activities where some invisible trait could have a consequence on the outcome of that activity.
For example, if you are prone to heart disease and have been hired as a airline pilot, would your company be negligent if they could have required a simple test to find this out? Although this is a contrived example, the list of such situations could be endless and doubtless over time you will be asked again and again to submit to a genetic screen in the future. (in the same way that as an American you don't have to give out your social security number, but if you want to access to a credit card or a bank account you sort of have to).
Will this lead to people be denied access to certain activities due to their genetics - absolutely. I'm not laying out a moral judgement here, just that this future is almost a certainty.
It is far more likely that your "genetic upper class" will be heavily discriminated against.
Worst case would be that the world splits into countries with exclusively natural born and genetically engineered people and that those countries would enter into conflict with the goal of driving the other extinct.
I never understood that. I don't think the movie is clear exactly what happens, but he... does swim back, right? Or does he just flounder and rely on his brother bringing him back?
Also, he quite likely _does_ die in space. Which figuratively but very directly represents not leaving anything for the swim back. There is room to square the main message of the movie about transcending limits with Gore Vidal's line (something like) "No one exceeds his potential... It would simply mean we had failed to accurately assess it in the first place." Maybe he makes it back, maybe he doesn't, but he goes, does what he sets out to do with no consideration of whether he will be able to return and then tries to return. It's exactly equivalent to people who say they would go to Mars even without knowing whether it is a one-way trip at the outset.
One message of the movie could be that there is no fixed measure of potential. There are too many variables. One of them being how badly someone wants to achieve something. Thus it’s massively unfair to measure someone’s potential at birth.
He is willing to die to succeed. If that meant in that moment to outswim his brother he had to drown then he was willing to do it. His brother was limited by his fear of death and his subconscious need to still turn around and swim back. He had no concern so was willing to go as long as it took. It just so happened that he was physically fit enough to be able to make the return swim as his brother quit in time.
The movie leaves it a little vague, but his brother disappearing would wrap up the plot nicely, as would his brother finally seeing the Vincent's perspective and keeping his mouth shut. On a broader level it's the "burn the ships" strategy; nothing motivates like having no alternative.
I thought it was a large lake or inlet, and it would take less effort to keep swimming to the land at the other side than it would to turn around and swim back to the start.
Well that would make sense. I thought it was the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. Especially since Anton seems confused by that also. Also if they were closer to the other side physically, rather than metaphorically, why turn around?
I mean, it does depend on how you look at it. You might win by swimming out farther, but you might consider that a loss if you drown on the way back. The survivor would at least see that as a win for them.
He was more than just his DNS/genetics - his soul, and strength weren't measurable by his genetics, and having a challenge in life, being "less", was actually a blessing, as he tired harder and did more with what he had than what those who were given so much with did - nothing
No joke, this film helped me get over really bad mental stuff. That the human spirit can sort of compensate for pretty much anything is what I find beautiful. But the bad side is the faustian bargain, the sacrifice.
Same for me. I often think about this movie along with your point about how some people have to pay more for their dreams. The way that I think about things now I think reflects the protagonist in the movie: In many ways it doesn't matter. The goal and the obsession that some people have is so all-consumming that they'd pay any price to achieve it.
There's a scene where ethan hawke's character has to go through a painful bone procedure to adjust his height and he comforts himself by thinking he's a few inches closer to the stars.
Everything is just about coming one step closer to the goal regardless of if it can be reached or if someone else can get there faster.
Completely true. I found myself last year waking up every day saying fuck it, 5 caffeine pills to read the next book and same thing tomorrow, suffering is relative and sort of fake, it's just an experience like any other. There's only one life so it doesn't matter how easy someone else has it, that's inaccessible. Anyway I was fucked up over my brain and balls being fucked up from birth and losing 50% of my net worth but now that I am like two months away from owning a house and have the job that I want I've forgotten what used to bother me it's not even on the map anymore, call it nonattachment or call it positive nihilism you just grow past things. Im healed after surgery and walk normally, I blend in so and so and that's good enough
I understand this article appeared in Nature Genetics and so explores the genetics aspect of the movie (which is admittedly heavily emphasized, starting with the G-A-T-C letters highlighted in the title and opening credits), but I always thought it is about the practice of discrimination in general, regardless of what "quality" is chosen to put people in sets of "A" and "B".
How literally should the audience take this cautionary tale?
It is up to you. Like any good piece of art (literature, painting, sculpture, documentaries, movies, fiction etc), saying something specific to the audience is just the first order effect and sometimes not even the most important one. Inspiring you to get on a process of discovery, interpretation, asking more questions, is what any great art aspires to do.
The thing I liked most in some ways about the film is that society is in some ways correct: going to space with a heart defect is a real issue and we already exclude people based on such issues for very real and valid reasons. Yet, we can't help but root for the protagonist who has their dream denied through no fault of their own but instead the choices of their society and parents. Compelling. If taken in a less extreme sense I think it's a good film for reflecting how much much genetics does determine what we can do, even today, and the reality that many of these limits do ipso facto exclude us from our dreams. As much of life is learning to live with this reality as it is striving to achieve our dreams. The film, of course, presents us with a character who cannot live with it (although with limitations not from genetics) and ultimately commits suicide, and another character who achieves their dream but for whom we do not see the possibly morbid consequences as it is the end of the film.
The part that I could never get over is that the discrimination against the main character actually made sense. He's trying to hide his heart condition to go in an important space mission.
edit: HN is rate limiting me so I can't reply, but to
davesque's comment below:
> 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. (Probably earlier than that, actually, as I doubt there is a single genetic combination of my parents that makes an NFL player). On that same day it was determined that I would never have to study in school.
I guess I'm just more comfortable with the fact that genetics plays such a decisive role in our lives than most people, and that's probably why I didn't see the movie as particularly interesting.
I think you're missing part of the movie's message. And that was that no one wants to live in a world where their life and capabilities are pre-determined. The audience is supposed to feel that viscerally as we see Vincent's striving and frustration. The story is told from an individual perspective because we are, after all, individuals. In that sense, our emotional reaction to our lives matters and society should care about that.
Put another way, there's a tail in every distribution. From the point of view of an individual that ends up in the tail, being passed over for the good things in life feels like a great injustice. And the fact is that we may not be aware of all the characteristics that could make someone successful. Maybe that's what makes evolution as a process so effective.
In Vincent's case, he was able to beat his brother swimming out to sea because he was at peace with the uncertainty that his life had forced on him. Anton didn't have that strength because he'd been told his whole life that he was destined for success. Even though Anton should have won, it turned out that Vincent's attitude made him more fit to survive which was something that the massive statistical apparatus of his society couldn't have predicted.
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.
> The part that I could never get over is that the discrimination against the main character actually made sense. He's trying to hide his heart condition to go in an important space mission.
That's the part I also couldn't ever get over. He's shown to have a serious heart condition, and then cheats his way onto a space mission?
Yes sure, discrimination bad and all that but— that's a human judgement. In actual fact, he's dramatically increasing the risk of failure of said mission, along with the risks to everyone else involved with it.
My own take-away was that, grit or not, he's incredibly selfish.
Those are great points. To follow the argument: is a lion selfish when she kills a gazelle?
To me, the story is about individual struggle. Even if his behaviour is selfish, his life is richer than if he accepted the imposed limitations by others (imagine how boring that story would be, why is that).
In a way, he is following nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest), instead of the arbitrary deterministic society rules he lives in.
Ultimately, if we only cared about the good of the planet, we would probably choose to cease to exist. Up to a point, everyone alive is a bit selfish.
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.
> he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest
If they are the fittest, how come he can actually do it? If he can "win", that is fit enough for nature, moral questions aside.
If we had a whole system saying that people with 11 toes always run faster, and a person with 10 toes wins once, that system was based on false premises, taken as objective truth without proof.
Now, if we have a system that claims people with 11 toes usually/on average run faster, why not allow the diversity of runners with 10 toes?
'the fittest' could destroy him but choose not to -- since fitness in a social species is, reductively, how groups of elites structure their power games over others.
elites 'let you win' some games for all sorts of ulterior motives, implicit or unconscious even.
Vincent barely wins for a small time, he almost collapses on the treadmill lmao
My point is they left the exclusion / ruthlessness dial at level 7 when they could choose to crank it to 9
Vincent takes advantage of that temporarily, next guy and group will be punished for it.
> That's the part I also couldn't ever get over. He's shown to have a serious heart condition, and then cheats his way onto a space mission?
But he survived. He survived far longer than calculated. Isn't this direct evidence that his genetically determined heart condition was successfully counteracted by a non-genetically identified trait?
And his perfection and determination when designing the mission plan was flawless. Presumably far more flawless than the "valids" he was working with, despite having an inferior genome, or the director would never have commented on it. His attitude dramatically improved the odds of mission success.
You seem to be arguing that if a metric says "don't do it", that this metric should be obeyed, even in light of evidence that it is wrong. Had the metric about his heart condition been correct, he never would have made it onto the flight.
I think this is just the plot device to explore the broader questions around scienetific progress, the hubris of a society that increases their knowledge and the general idea of fate. It's kind of "cool/scary" IMO that we can start with a pretty universally agreed-upon statement like "People going into space should be screened for health issues" and end up with the dystopian world explored in GATTACA.
The movie is suggesting that the criteria for the mission and the fatalistic attitudes of society are somewhat incomplete by showing that Vincent's 99th percentile "grit" has been completely overlooked because of the genetic stuff which is more readily measured.
Perhaps it's true that his genetic predisposition, as measured, is 70th percentile, but there are other relevant factors towards being a good astronaut that aren't so easily measured, to say nothing of environmental factors affecting cardiac health as well as the reliability of the gene-based measurement itself.
There is a certain probability he will have the heart condition. That actually happened. There is a separate, dependent probability that given he has the heart condition he will die very young. That, at the point of the movie, hasn't yet come to pass. I don't see the problem.
Rewatched it not long ago, was still a great watch, the pacing, the characters, the narration. Not as grandiose as it used to feel but still touching and worth every second.
I've seen Office Space twice, once before and once after a job I got laid off from where my job description was quite literally to take the requirements from the clients to the engineers. It really hit different after that.
How did he get away with Idiocracy? I thought it was a good movie and somewhat prescient, but if you peel back the layers it is basically advocating some kind of population control or eugenics policy. Or it is just a comedy, but I hear it frequently cited as a dramatized version of a plausible future.
I see it more like advocating for quality public education, easy access to contraception, and accountability of the elites in guiding our civilization. And as an observation that we're still just monkeys with transistors.
..and if you have been away from America for a while, the absurdity of greeters will be apparent. Reality is not too far off from "Welcome to Costco, I love you"
That is indeed the "problem" that forms the premise of the film. It doesn't however go on to either propose or advocate a solution, instead exploring one projection to absurdity from it's premise.
If you watched it and came away with a feeling it was pro-eugenics, you are absolutely projecting your own details onto the film.
You could also view it as a satire of that very idea - here's this absurd future that people are afraid of, it'd suck, but anyone who believes in this being a realistic possibility is likely a fool. No society could actually run if humans devolved to that level and very, very few people are as unintelligent as the characters in that film.
I don't really get the love for Idiocracy. You know the amusement ride with the really obviously bad history? The whole movie is basically that. They know their audience doesn't know much history so they need to make mistakes dumb enough so everyone will get it.
It's a cynical movie that knows its audience isn't so smart, so they need to make sure the idiots watching know who the real idiots are. That way the audience can enjoy watching a lot of really dumb stuff while feeling above it instead of targeted.
Throw away comment but to anybody that likes this movie and it's ideas, I highly recommend the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. It's the concepts of this film allowed to run their course for a few hundred years.
I guess I never thought it was much more than a good movie. I mean what is the message supposed to be? For one thing the main character has a heart condition and absolutely should be weeded out of the space mission he is trying to get on. As a larger point about a dystopian future with discrimination based on genetic characteristics I don't think it works either. We discriminate like that based on genetics now. It's just that it comes from random chance at birth rather than human modification, but really what's the difference?
IMO the message is that you can change your destiny with grit and effort, no matter what any authority (even science) says, and trying that is worth it, even if you fail.
I think it is a movie about life and how ruthless it is.
Exactly! We are all already the beneficiaries and casualties of the unearned rewards and punishments due to the randomized genetic combination we received at conception. Kathryn Paige Harden brilliantly explains this ethical challenge in her book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality”, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th...
> In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health—and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society.
> In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.
As a professor of clinical psychology, Harden is well situated to introduce us laypersons to the overwhelming strong evidence that genes matter. Notably, even biological siblings only share 50% of their genes with each other. Therefore the randomization in genetic combination alone can create differences in innate strengths and weaknesses among children with the same parents. A lottery is the appropriate metaphor for the lack of control any of us have in the genes we’re bestowed at conception.
Genetic engineering may offer an equalizer, but that presents its own ethical challenges. Harden instead argues that we should design a sufficiently robust welfare state to counteract these natural inequities. She presents a Rawlian framework (ie, veil of ignorance) to argue for why we should not accept genetic privileges and disadvantages anymore than we’d accept other injustices.
>Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy [...]
There's an on-going philosophical discussion about meritocracy. The debate on i2c[^2] is fascinating. I've read both books, but I was leaning towards Sandel from the get-go anyway.
However reading about this topic on the DNA /generic side is equally interesting. Thanks for the link to the book :-)
> I mean what is the message supposed to be? For one thing the main character has a heart condition and absolutely should be weeded out of the space mission he is trying to get on.
Why? Their discriminatory predictions were incorrect. Space travel is clearly quite routine in this future, so to put it in today's terms, would you forbid people with heart conditions from driving cars or trucks?
we don't know that because the movie stops before we can figure that out. I went to school with a guy who had a medical condition that put him at risk of passing out, albeit rarely. but he could legally drive. Ended up having an episode and veering into the oncoming traffic and his 19 year old girlfriend ended up dead.
There's a potential less romantic ending to the movie where Vincent strokes out on the rocket and gets someone killed. The allegedly positive message of the film is that someone's self image is more important than even justified standards that exist to protect other people. Mind you in the film he even fakes his heart rate during a test and collapses afterwards, suggesting this is not some abstract form of discrimination.
> we don't know that because the movie stops before we can figure that out
We do know they were incorrect, because he was already considerably older than his predicted age of death. We also know they were incorrect because he outperformed people who were his "intellectual superiors".
> There's a potential less romantic ending to the movie where Vincent strokes out on the rocket and gets someone killed.
And that can also happen to the genetically enhanced. The whole point of the movie is that statistics are not certainties.
> The allegedly positive message of the film is that someone's self image is more important than even justified standards that exist to protect other people.
No, the positive message of the film is that genetic statistics cannot capture the full potential of a human being, and that the standards that were in place were in no way "justified".
> We discriminate like that based on genetics now. It's just that it comes from random chance at birth rather than human modification, but really what's the difference?
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.
> 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 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.
> 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 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".
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?
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.
We can do some editing of some of the somatic cells in adults, and those edits have some effect. Reaching all of the somatic cells is actually quite difficult. We have had significantly better results with germline genetic engineering in animal models.
If you really need to reach all the cells, that's how you'll do it. For example, if your trait is developmental in nature.
Oh I know: I loved the movie so much (and still do) and found it so cool that the movie was named that way on purpose that I gave my daughter four given names and they start respectively with G, A, T and C...
There is a bit of survivorship bias. Sci-fi has imagined every possible universe, some of the predictions feel very close to what is transpiring. And if we focus entirely on the human stories behind technological facades or other cultural variability, some people claim that all possible stories have been written already.
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 also think there is a negativity bias in effect here. I have noticed that dystopian stories like Gattaca always seem more realistic, even when they are not.
Look at 1984, it got almost all of the details wrong, and yet, many people say it is somehow visionary because it had a few things somewhat right. That's, I think, because almost all of it is negative, and because of that natural bias, we tend to think of these of more relevant.
Greg Egan's _Diaspora_ (1997) and _Oceanic_ (1998) come to my mind. Of course not really predating, with what we now recognize as gender fluidity existing for thousands of years, but in any case early texts long before the notion rose to be widely known in our culture.
Those are probably written too late, I'd say they would need to be written in 1990 or before to really count as predicting anything. Though actually, if they predict it with more accuracy and say how common it is (so it's not just the one weird character being weird, but also not being anywhere close to everyone) that might be something as well.
I vaguely remembered a short story where a person at a cocktail party had been a different gender the week before, although some people never changed. It might be:
> Robert Silverberg's Son of Man (1971), whose protagonist is transposed into the Far Future and there experiences a wide range of ways of being human, including being female...
Is it really? Changes to biological intelligence are irrelevant in a world with one decade timelines until human level artificial general intelligence.
If you genetically engineer your kids they still need to slowly grow up. By the time they turn 18 years old the world may already be dominated by machines.
I’m glad many of you enjoyed the movie. I watched it for the first time last month and did not enjoy it personally. I think the thing that kept making me not believe the narrative was the assumption that you could somehow control how your DNA was left behind. Your body leaves behind hair and skin cells and eyelashes and whatever constantly. No amount of scrubbing like he does in the movie will help that. Also the idea that we would have really advanced genetics but not better genetic detection and tracking technology was not believable for me either.
It’s a shame because I think the core idea of the movie was interesting. I just wish the implementation was more believable for me.
I'm not sure about that, possibly he put some sort of special make-up/glue-ish stuff on his face to try to seal it in, and his clothes caught the rest of it? He's seen putting stuff in his hair, probably for that purpose. Anyway, how sensitive are detectors in real life? Remember, you need enough intact genetic material to figure out who it is, it's not like detecting anthrax or something where you can just look for a few short conserved snippets. I imagine it's not something PCR works especially well on, so you might not be able to amplify it at all.
Sci-fi has always accidentally reflected the limited imagination of the era it was written in. My favorite example is Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, written before digital displays were a thing. In the story technology has advanced so far that humans have landed on Mercury for mining, but they have to track their lost robots by manually drawing a pencil graph of their radar pings.
Most works that touch upon core issues like Gattaca does tend to be relevant many years later.
This is why we still read greek philosophers, works from the Renaissance, works from the time of the American Revolution (The Federalist Papers, for example), etc...
The works that touch on these core issues are not often as well executed as Gattica - sometimes you wind up with Mean Girls ... ok that is a bad example as that is a timeless classic as well.
Being able to bring important academic thought to the masses in an entertaining way is important, hard and potentially lucrative though, and Mean Girls delivers!
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.
> 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?
Most people in discriminated classes in the real world don't go out trying to change society.
> Most people in discriminated classes in the real world don't go out trying to change society.
What is your evidence for this claim? I'm not as certain as you that a majority of people in discriminated classes don't try to change their society for the better. Maybe it depends on exactly what you mean by "change society", but at least for me, I see even small discussions like the one we're having here as potentially changing society.
By the way, I'm curious, and please correct me if I'm wrong (as I'm not trying to misrepresent your beliefs): Are you making a normative claim here too, like "Discriminated classes shouldn't try to change their societies"?
> 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?
Yes, it absolutely makes sense for one lone individual to pursue self-actualization against the odds rather than embark on a crusade to remake the world around him against even greater odds.
Moreover, systemic change results from lots of stories like this piling up, proving that the underlying narrative driving the discrimination was always false.
> 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?
I think this is a little naive.
Why should every member of an underclass have to fight the good fight vs improve their own personal position? IMO, the latter is much more likely.
History is filled with counterexamples. Discriminated people who do great things are discounted as once-offs, ceremonially inducted into the in-group or ignored entirely.
definitely - look at sports, academics, etc. Once something "impossible" gets completed, it gets repeated more frequently and widely than you'd expect.
if you are broadly discriminated against I think it makes perfect sense that you focus on one, important thing and try to overcome that. Otherwise you'll just continually be beat down and get nowhere. I think the film does a good job showing this realistic path.
In my imagined ending he _does_ die in space, but after accomplishing something great and as a result the obstacles he overcame to get there become known and contribute to the very slow process of realigning society.
lol how exactly do you expect him to change things if he stayed? Once he's back he'll be able to actually make a difference with the status/resources he got by leaving.
It tells you something about HN that there are like ten replies arguing that he should have the right to be selfish, and only one that recognizes that he was doing exactly what people from minorities did in the past to overturn the belief that they couldn't do anything.
I'm glad you relate to it because it is amazing but if there is one criticism I could level, it is that the only female character seems like she is ~drugged~ for most of the movie. Uma Thurman is a good actress so I have to assume it was the direction/script.
Edit. Sorry, I was getting hyperbolic. There just isn't much development of her character so it is hard to see what the relationship between her and Ethan Hawke's character is even based on.
It's not just her who acts that way. It's every valid portrayed in the movie.
> "it is hard to see what the relationship between her and Ethan Hawke's character is even based on."
As implied in the movie he sees in her a person who, despite being a valid, is limited by the fact that she has a disability. The same kind of disability he has. Only she buys in to it and allows cultural expectations to limit her. He wants to "fix her". To show her that she may not be so limited if she has the fortitude to push past her limitation.
Also they probably find each other physically attractive too.
I mean, it's fair to be selfish and to recognize that people are allowed to be selfish. It's a big expectation that discriminated peoples should devote their life to changing the system that was unfair to them. We're all human and still want to achieve personal goals in our lifetime, many of which don't necessarily have to do with social justice.
Andrew Niccol's other sci-fi films, In Time and Anon are also very worth watching. In Time has the distinction of being the only film to make Harlan Ellison shut up.
Death by thesaurus: switching “relevant” to “pertinent” is incoherent in this context. If you are going to use a cliche or idiom, then use it without modification.
Not everyone has idioms memorized by word. Some of us have them memorized by gist, and our misunderstanding of words can cause us to get it gist wrong.
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!
Isn't Gattaca already here? Another commenter mentioned 0 down syndrome children born in Iceland. Aren't we already doing embryo selection as prospective parents in "1st world" countries?
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."
I don't mean Gattaca's full tech involving choosing traits for a child are here, but that the age of embryo and trait selection is here. Aren't some parents doing embryo selection filtering out undesirable traits?
In an effort to reduce the incidence of selective abortions, South Korea enacted a law in 1988 making it illegal for a doctor to reveal the gender of a foetus to expectant parents.
At the same time women were also becoming more educated, with many more starting to join the workforce, challenging the convention that it was the job of a man to provide for his family.
It worked, but it was not for one reason alone. Rather, a combination of these factors led to the eventual gender rebalancing.
South Korea was acknowledged as the "first Asian country to reverse the trend in rising sex ratios at birth", in a report by the World Bank.
This movie holds up. I recently rewatched and really, really enjoyed it. (Some spoilers embedded in the below.)
One thing I love about the script is how the 4 main characters give us all the different angles on the genetic dystopia problem.
Vincent is genetically "inferior", but psychologically "determined" to overcome physical limitations. He has to use his mind and body to overcome his genetics.
Jerome is genetically "superior", but psychologically defeated due to his accident causing permanent physical limitations. He has to use his mind to compensate for his body, and he "lends" his genetics to Vincent, to make Vincent as capable in their society as he once was. Vincent helps Jerome finally achieve his own potential by the end, thus the final scene.
Anton is genetically "superior", but mentally and physically weak. His willpower atrophied as he was constantly told about his genetic superiority. In a way, he allowed his genetics to act almost like an inheritance that made him soft and unambitious. Through the flashbacks, we get the sense that he was always a little cocky about his genetic superiority. He was "born into success". But through adult Anton, we learn that all he has done with his genetics is to become a conformist in this dystopian society. A rule enforcer of the genetic state itself, not someone striving for any higher purpose. When Anton loses the swim match to Vincent, he lets him go on with his plan (not shown in the script or movie), presumably because Vincent has proven that genetics alone do not determine ability, shattering one of his core beliefs.
Finally, Irene. She is genetically "upper class", but not "superior". She illustrates the degree to which genetics had become a class marker, like wealth in our current society. She is genetically strong enough to join the space exploration program, but not strong enough to be an astronaut, perhaps only a scientist. (Her last name is Cassini.) She is just as driven by passion for humanity's potential as Vincent, and just as angry about the genetic lottery. That is why they connect as they do. But, in her case, she discovers -- through Vincent's display of willpower -- that her heart condition does not have to limit the life she can lead today. Irene represents society at large, discovering that living your life under the determinism of genetics (or any other limiting class & rule system) will cause you to live a smaller life than you otherwise could.
Vincent shows us what we can aspire to despite our imperfections, and Irene shows us how to come to terms with living a happy life despite our imperfections.
"Irene" has its origin in the Greek word for "peace" (coming to terms with life as it is). Whereas "Vincent" has its origin in the Latin word for "conquer" (fighting against life's limitations and winning).
Interestingly enough, the article ends up in what I understand is a circular loop: a concern about the best in society. I'd prefer a concern about the average neighbour and person, instead.
Where do you rent dvd with director’s cut? I used to listen to why the director created the scene a certain way so I could learn the art of film making.
at current levels space travels is risky, high cost and prestige. except for couple of private space tourists in last couple of years, everyone else was chosen by governments, predominantly fighter pilots.
billionaires will be going to space more often than commoners in this and possibly next decade.
I liked Gattaca but believe more in The Expanse kind of future colonisation of solar system.
I believe advances in AI will make the core plot idea of the film obsolete. It is a good movie, but even the most genetically perfect human will probably not have a fraction of the intelligence of AI. He will be, relatively speaking, a mere dummy like the rest of us. Thus the future as shown in this film will not happen.
However, good sci-fi is actually always about the present. And the movie has a lot of interesting things to say about the human condition in the late 1990s and now.
The elite in Gattaca weren't genetically perfect (i.e. the upper echelon of a race born by natural chance), they were genetically engineered. There's a big difference here. Humans are biological computers. There's no reason we can't be made like computers too, with features added that give us the same advantages as silicon machines. In fact it's more likely that silicon machines will become more like us, due to the density, three-dimensionality, power efficiency, and antifragility of our wetware, which is the product of eight billion years of natural selection rather than a century of industrialization. So I think Gattaca is entirely plausible, although it wouldn't surprise me if the oppression ends up happening in the complete opposite direction, where the genetically engineered superior creatures aren't granted human status and instead used as a slave caste by the faith births who wield their unfairly inherited wealth and power.
I am not so sure of that future. I do believe that AI will have incredible capabilities. I also think the human race would destroy the planet trying to maintain control. We will do everything possible to make AI a slave to our wills, up to and including genetically engineering ourselves to brain-computer interface with and dominate AIs if that’s what it takes.
I understand the established narrative is that AI will zoom past us and subjugate us before we even realize it. I saw we would never go down without a fight and our survival and domination instinct is more powerful than any machine.
From what I remember the film didn't focus on intelligence. The main character suffers from genetic disorders that affect his health and lifespan, plus discrimination based on his 'invalid' status. All of that is still very relevant regardless of any progress with AGI.
IQ was mentioned a couple times in the film, and the main character was shown studying very hard to keep up with his job. The fact that it wasn't the sole focus of the selection program was a consequence of the whole society wanting to do it. It wasn't a bunch of super-nerds doing something weird, the idea was that every part of our society's conception of achievement and "human quality" had been folded in to the nightmare, which made it inescapable.
Fair enough, but health and fitness are not just for sport and culture. It's practical; you don't want your astronauts to have medical emergencies in space. Similarly, if you put resources into training them you'd rather they didn't die at 30 due to poor genetics.
If any new tech threatens to render the premise obsolete, it's robotics. Not sending humans to space in the first place avoids the issue of selecting astronauts at all.
Well, you have to be open to a little symbolism in films. "Astronaut" is a universally recognized symbol of someone who is fit and highly educated, and who had passed a lot of tests to gain access to an esteemed position.
> perfect human will probably not have a fraction of the intelligence of AI.
Yes.. but he will still be operational even when the electricity is interrupted, which will make him look light years ahead of the AI. The "AI" will always have this problem. Until it gets a body and an internal power source it won't match our capabilities, and even then, most likely.. it will start to share some of our vulnerabilities and common ends.
As if AI would somehow be unconstrained from the limits of physical engineering.
An AGI will very quickly understand how to create a body and self-sustaining solar or nuclear energy source for itself, far more independent than our needs of water, food, oxygen, and warmth.
Good movie, but according to these plots, it was better to be handicapped in 1023 than it is 2023. Let's say genetic engineering assisted human evolution became a reality and enhanced humans pretty much dominated exciting things like space exploration. To be more ethical, participation could be selected by neutral merit tests, but in practice enhancement would still end up as a dominating factor. So what? I would still rather go on vacation to Mars on a spaceship built by enhanced folks than not go at all. Just like I am not realistically smart enough to make a new vaccine in a year, but I still enjoy not dying of the diseases. If genetic engineering is available to all parents and has no adverse side effects, why treat it differently from prenatal vitamins or hiring tutors in school? Some people will choose to go without genetic engineering, or vitamins, or vaccines and that's fine - they can find their own unique role in society and we all benefit of having a control group for our various experiments. Tons of valuable science only exists because of Amish, and the later seem to be perfectly happy to live their own way, and if someone are unhappy we don't stop them from leaving.
It's odd that everyone talks about 'genetic enhancements' as a measure of success or opportunity because I never even thought about the film as being about that.
I thought the film was far more about eugenic fascism, and that kind of thing being wrong in the first place?
It's not a story about a kid who 'beat the system in which he wasn't supposed to belong'.
It's a story about a system of 'stupid requirements'.
It wasn't 'amazing' that he was able to keep up with the 'genetically perfect' rather the notion that 'genetic perfectionism' is a bit absurd.
It's like if society only handed jobs to those with 'perfect SAT scores', well yes, it's a measure of 'perfection' of some kind correlated with positive things, but it's not that big of a deal.
The Nazis were very big on genetic perfection, and this is a classically Hollywood dig at their ideology.
Now they should update it for 2023 and have it about students meeting 'genetic criteria' for Ivy League admissions, which is a weirder game than trying to get to space ...
> have it about students meeting 'genetic criteria' for Ivy League admissions
the film's premise was that space exploration is still relatively new frontier, and selection into the program is both a prestige affair, as well as expensive (with potential failures costly). Pre-screening candidates with high statistical rates of success makes sense for such a program imho.
Not everyone in society has to have the opportunity to be at the frontiers of human affairs.
Now, having genetic criteria for admission into education, on the other hand, is pure discrimination. There's no need, unless the resources put into education is high, such that the failure of the student puts heavy cost burdens into the system.
I don't share the prevailing opinion of Gattaca. I recall the main character as lying and cheating to to hide their genetic predisposition to heart failure. So they can take a place on a space mission, endangering a billion-dollar craft and the lives of the other crewman, all for hubris.
> endangering a billion-dollar craft and the lives of the other crewman
which is the an outcome that was produced by the societal bias towards imperfect people.
For example, instead of denying the role to him purely based on genetics tests, they could measure the actual performance against a standard (a standard which you'd need to perform at to do the job).
Then, if he is predisposed to heart failure, there could be provisions made to ensure it doesn't interrupt the mission or endanger people on board. Even perfectly healthy people could get a heart attack due to something unpredictable, so having the facility and knowledge to handle such a situation is good regardless.
Instead, the society is choosing to eliminate heart failure (or failure modes) - and i think they're blinded by the idea that they must've succeeded by using genetics.
'Imperfect people' cannot become Astronauts today. For good reason.
You can't wish that away - heart failure. It's like I said, asking others to risk their lives for an avoidable risk, so that one guy can have 'their dream'.
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.
Gattaca set the field of biotech back by decades. Countless hours have been wasted pointing to the movie for why we should not go down the slippery slope of genetic choice. 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."
Or as I like to put it Gattaca put the spotlight on research which had been treading the line of ethics for a decade with a dangerous lack of supervision and helped convince people that putting the brakes on it was welcome. That’s fiction playing its role.
Well, the problem we deal with today is that parents--actually medical professionals--choose death for children rather than allow them to live out their lives.
Zero children with Down Syndrome are born in Iceland. Why? Because physicians would rather end their lives as soon as they find out that they "suffer" from the condition. I placed "suffer" in quotes, because many of us are quite aware that people with Down Syndrome don't suffer any more or less than the rest of us with a medical condition, and many of them lead happy and productive lives for a relatively long time.
But if the physicians, or the parents, can just head off that predicted suffering within a 9-month time frame, nobody has to suffer at all (beyond one little procedure.)
Sometimes I wonder who would suffer more, a child born with Down, or overly-entitled parents who will always wish their baby wasn't so... imperfect.
I think there's some status quo bias here? Seems like if Down's Syndrome didn't exist, someone who invented it and caused children to born with it would be considered a monster?
I don't particularly agree with your comment but it does point out another aspect of the movie's genius: it presents the scenario, makes us think and suggests some conclusions but doesn't beat us over the head with moral lessons. In other words, it treats the viewer like an adult.
I don't think that's at all what you should get out of Gattaca on discrimination. Rather, even in a world where you have people who are statistically overwhelmingly likely to be better in every way, the morally right thing to do is _still_ to allow people the same opportunities to excel, and succeed or fail on their merits.
> the morally right thing to do is _still_ to allow people the same opportunities to excel, and succeed or fail on their merits.
let me play devils' advocate for a minute: should the cutting edge of human endeavour (in the case of the movie, it's going to space) be available to all and sundry, even tho statistically the superior humans would do better and thus achieve the goals of said endeavour?
If it costs the equivalent of billions or even trillions of dollars, would you make the choice to allow equal opportunity to all, at the cost of potential mission failure, rather than discriminate heavily and only allow those considered perfect?
I agree that discrimination is usually bad. But is it really discrimination, or is it competition, to only allow those that would be statistically overwhelmingly likely to be better to do the thing?
Bingo. It's mostly a story about discrimination. Unfortunately it is mistakenly used as a cautionary tale to slow down or prevent progress on genetics.
> Therefore the statistical estimates issued by genetic experts have to be true; otherwise, there is simply no story to tell.
(from your first link)
The movie obliquely addresses this when Vincent experiences a non-fatal heart attack on the treadmill. The scientific predictions are not infallible but some people seem to have forgotten that.
Is this a joke? It is just some science fiction movie and not a particularly good one. It is just that it was the first movie for many people that involved genetic engineering. The actual impacts of the engineering was to pass a gene scanner test. In no way did the depicted society actually depend on this genetic engineering.
"Biomedical ethicist Ronald Michael Green reports that Gattaca 'lives on in bioethics classrooms around the country as the epitome of what is bad about human gene interventions' [...] Like Brave New World before it, Gattaca has become a rhetorical resource for public debates about biotechnological futures (Lynch, 2019, p. 34; Von Burg, 2010, p. 4), with allusions to it frequently deployed as a commonplace for the unethical consequences of human genetic manipulation. But what if this is wrong?"
A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later. Gattaca chose to focus on the story and create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.