[ExI] dna to search

spike spike66 at att.net
Sat Nov 8 17:01:05 UTC 2014


 

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2014 7:43 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] dna to search

 

>…This looks like a done deal to me and what we have to urge the law to do is to stop insurance companies from using the data to exclude people  You can't stop dedicated hackers…

 

Indeed not sir.  Technology can run circles around any system of law.  Technological change is accelerating while legal change is slowing.  We cannot depend on law to help stop insurance companies from using this information.  Reasoning: there is no way to prove that the reason the insurance company rejected an applicant was based on DNA.  We are now finding that the law cannot dictate a price structure on insurance companies either; they find a way.  

 

But on the contrary in any case.  The insurance companies are selling an understanding of medical risks; that is their value-added function.  Anything that helps us understand medical risks allows them to price medical risks more effectively.  Without that value-added, we do not even need medical insurance companies.  So they should be encouraged to use all available resources to do more of their value-added function, by our buying stock in the med-ins companies who are best at figuring out what its clients are eating, drinking and smoking, then most effectively using all available technology and choosing their clientele in accordance.

 

>… But I am all for anything that pushes forward the use of DNA in medicine…

 

The whole scheme is compelling.  I can imagine some really interesting possibilities analogous to what happened back in the 90s when Google showed up.

>…You conservative libertarians are going to be against this and anything else that promises to get info on you…

 

Not necessarily.  There are openness advocates and privacy advocates, but that doesn’t map onto conservative/liberal/libertarian plane.  I wouldn’t call myself a conservative libertarian, but rather a person who is watching how the concentration of power has led directly to corruption.  Surely no one missed the recent IRS comment that they didn’t bother looking for Director Lerner’s “lost” emails in alternative locations because they already knew there would be nothing found there.  Indeed?  How did they know?  How can they be sure the disk smashers didn’t accidentally miss one somewhere and a disk failed to crash?

 

As for a link between libertarian and openness/privacy, it isn’t clear how that correlates.

 

>… but I think that the day will come, and not too far into the future, where you can walk into a door way, it smells you, and knows what you ate, drank and smoked last night…

 

I don’t see why not.  That would be a good medical diagnostic tool.  Now since we, the taxpayers, are picking up the tab for many medical insurance of those who cannot afford it, we have the right to use technologies which would make those medical procedures more effective and cheaper, ja?  So if the doctor knows what you ate, drank and smoked, that would be a good first step, ja?

 

>…  Maybe even who you had sex with, or ate least their gender…

 

Ja, useful medical information is this, and our right to know it since we are paying for the consequences.

 

>…  And the level of your pheromones and only God knows what else.  If we put our minds to it, we could probably train dogs to do this…

 

Dog can already do this, but they can’t tell us what they are finding.  If dogs can do it, we can teach machines to do it.  

>…We can't all live in a cave.  bill w

 

Even if it is a really really big cave?  Why not?

 

spike

 

 

 

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