[ExI] 23andme again

spike spike at rainier66.com
Wed Jul 3 05:03:54 UTC 2013


>... On Behalf Of spike
>Subject: Re: [ExI] 23andme again

>...That makes for a hell of a note: some sleazy bastard does some crime,
gets away, some arbitrary period of time later, you figure out who it is,
and even where he lives.  The cops will not do anything about what you have
discovered, they don't act on that kind of information.  But you know who it
is...what happens next?  spike

_______________________________________________

Do forgive me for obsessing about this, but it is at least vaguely
transhumanist in the sense that it is a vision of the future society in
which we will live and attempt to achieve our transhumanist vision.

We know that crime is already changing as a result of the proliferation of
security cameras and home security alarm systems.  As technology advances,
citizens are empowered to solve crimes, more than the cops are in a way.
Reasoning: as ever more homes get sophisticated security systems that take
photos and store them on the internet, burglary becomes ever less profitable
and practical.  Since fewer people carry currency now, I would think mugging
must be declining; less profitable.  So the result is that we need fewer
cops.  So the ones remaining aren't all that terribly motivated to capture
and haul away their declining pool of clients: the sleazebags.  So we have
too many cops, and we need to lay off some of them.

At the same time, we are getting all these new tools for catching bad guys,
among them 23andMe.  We also know that there are a hundred ways to do
amateur sleuthing with a DNA signature.  Envision a crime victim who somehow
recovers the perp's DNA, sends it in, opens an account, then starts a
23-forum where the victim announce to everyone there: "Account Perp-66 is an
unknown bad guy.  A crisp K-note to the first person who can identify him,
and provide some compelling evidence."

I might take a shot at that for a thousand bucks, and I might even work at
developing a collection of scripts which would do the tricks I have learned.
The point is that we enter an era when we might be able to catch way more
bad guys for a very reasonable price.  We can easily imagine crime victims
putting up a hundred bucks to enter the perp's DNA into the database and a
thousand for identifying who it is.  What I don't know is what the legal
system will do if a private citizen catches the bastard; probably nothing.
Enforcement doesn't want competition in the enforcement business.

spike




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list