Obviously, an LLM is in a perfect position to decide whether an add can be "injected" into the current conversation. If you're using it for creative writing it will be add free. But chances are you will also use it to solve real world problems where relevant adds can be injected via product or service suggestions.
I'm a genetic engineer at a large pharma company. Genetic engineering of human model systems is my specialty. If I were a malicious actor, I could not do anything useful with the genome of any one person.
Most peoples genomes are boring and at best sway the predisposition for disease by a modest degree. Exposing infidelity is honestly the best I can come up with.
I reached out to a guy on 23andMe that was a DNA relative (2nd cousin) and said hi. Curious how we were related, I gave him some family names going several generations back, and asked if any of them rang a bell in his family history.
He responded quickly and said no, they did not.
Then a few weeks later I get another response. He said that one of the names had faintly rung a bell, and when he dug into it, it turned out that was the name of his mother's boss for much of her career as a secretary. His heart sank when he realized it. He and his siblings did genetic tests and confirmed that he, the youngest, was only a half-sibling. Both of the parents were deceased so there's no way to know what really happened.
After dropping that bomb in the poor guy's lap I stopped using the DNA Relatives feature.
The problem is you are not a malicious actor so you aren't coming up with good scams or truly malicious ideas.
How about scam emails that open by asking people about their family history of some disease with a genetic marker and promising some miracle treatment?
I can think of even worse outcomes depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts
Sounds complicated. Why not just figure out which genomes are simply correlated with people who don't support you and then pay off a bunch of scientists to write a bunch of garbage so that the medical industry doesn't care for them properly.
You do that kind of stuff across enough axis and the people who ought to be leaving your supporters dangling from the overpass will be too marginalized and preoccupied to do much of anything.
You don't even need "high tech" to do this sort of stuff. Depostic regimes have been doing it for centuries.
Blood is drawn from basically every infant born in the US and then genetically tested for various diseases. And the health departments retain these cards with the blood draws, although I’m not sure how usable they are decades later.
If you have a baby at home with a lay midwife, the health departments retain will hound you endlessly to get this done, although legally you can choose to decline as a parent. Barely anyone does, since most parents want to know if their newborn will have a serious genetic disorder that can be easily avoided by (for example) avoiding artificial sweeteners.
You'd think so, but the government of California was performing involuntary sterilizations until 2014. An ICE facility in Georgia performed them until at least 2020. It's legal under state law in over half the country.
What's different today that would create a massive outcry that there wasn't 4 years ago?
It's very amusing that the parent comment, or anyone else for that matter, believes their credentials somehow are enough to quell us about any potential horrific implications.
Parent comment is coming from an ethical person and ethical people often have a hard time imagining how unethical people operate.
Even I think I'm nowhere near unethical enough to maliciously use this dataset, but who would have thought that a social media platform where you scroll posts from your friends and family could be used as a political tool?
I added my credentials to address the "malicious scientist" scenario that some people may associate with leaked genetic information. You dont need an individual's genome to create rather dangerous gentic weaponry.
For example, we now have cell-penetrating prime editor ribonucleoproteins, a derivation of the CRISPR system. These are essentially assembled molecular machines that can be loaded install almost any genetic mutation, such as tumor driver mutations. A picogram of this protein complex is potentially enough to riddle your body with cancer a couple of years after delivery.
Malicious doesn't just have to be biological in nature just because the data here is biological. That data can be used for a variety of non-biological malicious uses.
scam emails are pennies on a dollar, though. it's so easy to just go through any email list ever and blast out thousands at once. It's not really a business that cares about targeted approaches.
>depending on how policy on immigration and naturalization shifts
Birthright citizenship invalidates such profling, but even then: I don't think the government needs DNA to figure out identities of people in the database.
> It's not really a business that cares about targeted approaches.
It's called open rate and open rates are heavily driven by titles. Spam filters also use reputation to rank senders and open rates are one indicator of sender "quality". They definitely use targeted approaches if they can get their hands on datasets.
> Birthright citizenship invalidates such profling
Only if you think that matters and the SCOTUS will uphold it. And of course, US isn't the only government; there are lots of other governments around the world.
>They definitely use targeted approaches if they can get their hands on datasets.
Even on a firesale, I doubt it would be cheap enough for the margins they work on. These aren't exactly large scale, sophsticated operations being worked with here.
>Only if you think that matters and the SCOTUS will uphold it.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think they will. If only because it's an absolute nightmare logistically trying to do it any other way. No country is going to accept a deportation flight of peopel who were not born on their land.
Or perhaps we have an underpopulation crisis decades later which does incentivize that. But that would solve the deportation issue in and of itself, right?
I’m much more concerned about Palestinians being targeted since they’ve already been the victims of AI weapons attacking civilians. Imagine if people with Palestinian/semitic DNA were leaked?
Palestinians do not have distinctive DNA that sets them apart from other populations in the Middle East. I'm not aware of movements that target levantine ancestry in general.
Zionism absolutely targets those with Levantine ancestry. They’ve killed far more people than whoever the op was talking about. Ashkenazis are under no threat.
Once 23andMe gets sold, all of that data belongs to whoever owns it and they can sell it to whoever they want. Perhaps to the government where they can do a warrantless search to find a relative of someone who may have been at a crime scene. Or to other governments. Or to insurance companies who want to play deny, defend and depose. I get that a lot of genetic information isn't predictive, but not all of it is so questionable.
It has statutory limitations, subject to change, in how it can be used to discriminate against you. But those are tightly defined. It couldn't be used to deny you employment or health insurance, but could be used to deny you housing or life insurance.
> at best sway the predisposition for disease by a modest degree
If insurance companies use this information to inform coverage decisions, then it's a moot point right? Just because you and I (who am also in this field) understand the limitations of the models and the data, does not mean that powerful entities will not use it to do stupid things.
I’ve done some of these saliva samples and I’ve seen the freak outs about what happens if “they” get my genome. But I cannot for the life of me figure out what they would do with it maliciously? It’s not like it can be used to sign up for a credit card or whatever.
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act gets repealed. Insurers immediately buy their database and drop you because you’re statistically more likely to get an illness.
Then we learn about the perils of "majority rules" setups, of lobbying, of trying to evaluate thousands of different decisions across hundreds or thousands of legislators, etc. and it becomes a lot less simple.
You live in a democracy until you don’t. It can disappear overnight with the stroke of pen from some populist leader who just ignores laws. Never think you are safe just because you’re in a democracy.
If a future totalitarian government wants to save money on medical treatments then they can just euthanize anyone who gets cancer rather than euthanizing anyone whose genes say that they have a 50%+ greater risk than average of getting cancer. Or collect genetic samples themselves and use that to cull the population rather than just do it for people who were 23andMe customers.
Killing people off after they get cancer saves money but it does nothing for the gene pool if they already reproduced. Individuals who represent high cancer risks can be forced into sterilization and can consider other options for children in the future, such as adoption or raising a genetic alternative child. Totalitarian regimes can take note here.
My favorite thriller story idea comes from knowing a character’s SNPs that are also covered by the standard forensic DNA panel. Then the antagonist in the story buys a bunch of oligos that flank the panel targets and spreads them around the crime scene to “frame” the character for murder!
So once the ‘’’bad guys’’’ purchase the 23andme database, the story is complete! They can then frame our protagonist…
It makes entertaining fiction, but in the real world, the ways that can be used to lock you up and discredit you in the public's eye are much more banal. And I doubt they'll get more sophisticated the way things look in the US right now.
With all those sweeping upgrades to artificial generational technologies, a time will come where no one will trust audio-visual clues and evidence collection will be solely focused on DNA fingerprints.
Also, genes pass down to your kids, compared to fingerprints which are just cca unique for each of us. What a terrible thing to (unknowingly) do to them. Gattaca and all.
When I first heard about them and similar services, the potential for abuse was the first thing that came to my mind. I am not paranoid in any way and those were easy times compared to now. Still, I prefer not knowing my ancestry than this.
And ancestry for Europeans is not such a hot topic, you just need to look at a bit of history of continent and its civilizations and get the idea.
Without spoilers, there's an entire chapter of the Three-Body Problem revolving around what can happen if you're a sufficiently high-value target whose genome has leaked.
Sell the entire database to a police state.
Identify embarrassing mutations and blackmail people to prevent them from being released publicly.
Corner high value individuals / billionaires, find an out of wedlock child, blackmail.
...
Faking DNA test results would be sci-fi nightmare come true. You could frame someone before they were arrested which would be ... Frightening. But even worse is invalidation of all DNA evidence because it is now easy to fake.
The most malicious behavior I can directly think of is someone searching the data for a targeted purpose and not caring about false positives, like targeted advertisement for health treatments with non-zero risk of side effects. DNA has always had this air of being infallible proof.
Plus they only have a selective number of SNPs, not the full genome.
But if you were able to somehow combine the information with the medical history of people, then you could use the data for research, and come up with some DL model maybe.
You don't even need real test results. You can just email customer's family members with fake claims and try to extort money, using names and test dates as evidence.
Perhaps you can explain a bit more because on the one hand you say that genetic data is worthless, but on the other hand, it provides you with an income ...
The people with the most to lose from widespread access to genetic data are those involved in outright crimes, like rape and child sexual abuse. Did you in a younger day get some underage girl pregnant? You're at risk. Or paternity lawsuits without the age restriction.
I wonder if some of those freaking out about the issue have a reason to be concerned.
On the other hand, once the information is out there, any aggrieved party will have plausible access to it, so it could be argued any statute of limitations would kick in.
For the vast majority of people lifestyle is much more deterministic than genetics. There are a few exceptions causing relatively deterministic adult onset diseases: Huntington, APOA4 homozygosity, FAP, BRACA mutants. These are rare however.
> For the vast majority of people lifestyle is much more deterministic than genetics.
How much of lifestyle do you think is determined by genetics, if any, and how much of that link do we currently understand?
I feel the concern around genetic data privacy has normally been the risk of unknown future stuff, rather than any current known vectors. I'm not saying it's a legitimate fear, but I don't know if it's one that is placated with "we can't currently do anything bad".
The impact of lifestyle is undeniable and large. Good genes will not protect your body from alcoholism. And if I were a betting man, I would bet against determinism emerging from a better understanding of combinatorial genetics.
I do think over time we will get a clearer picture of risk predisposition based on your entire genetic profile. However, I believe that genetic predisposion will remain a relatively small contributor for most disease states.
That's fair, thanks for the response, appreciated.
I agree that genetic predisposition will remain a small contributor for most disease states. However, I (an idiot who has no authority or experience with anything relating to genetics) feel we're going to learn a lot about how our genetics indirectly influence our behaviour and decision making though.
I think it'll be a boring dystopia: the biggest problem will be that the more complex, distant relationships between genetics and life outcomes are discovered, the more opportunities the bodies responsible for health will have to say "well we have to protect ourselves from the uncertainty, and that's going to cost you/be profitable for us".
All the other types of insurance (life/disability/etc) are free to ask you to provide DNA if they think it would be useful for underwriting. The fact that they do not means the DNA is not providing enough signal to be worth considering in the underwriting process.
You are not speaking from a position of a grifter though. I don't think it's a stretch that some YC funded startup could emerge and claim that they can map and predict everyone's entire actions/personalities/characteristics through their genome, heavily misinterpreting PGS/GWAS.
I don't think they would care much for scientific validity in this case. It won't matter to them if the methods used are reliable. All they'll get is appraisal from mainstream media for their revolutionary approach, further ingraining social darwinism.
>It won't matter to them if the methods used are reliable.
the method of being a fortune-teller? I don't see how that would ever be reliable unless we figure out voodoo kinds of tricks attacking the nervous system.
Phrenology thrived and was heavily celebrated only one century ago as well.
In the case of PRS assessment where it's already an established discipline, and not at all as unreliable as fortune-telling, it wouldn't be so hard to weaponize it.
Astrology isn't much farther off, and some still like to believe it to this day. Yes, even some very smart people can fall into absolutely baseless conjecture without peers to course correct.
But there's a difference between forming a cult and trying to convince the minds en masse of something.
Your info is off if you believe PRS assessments are anywhere close to pseudoscience.
And ok, let's agree for the sake of it that it is like astrology. Astrology is unnervingly popular, there are columns of big newspapers HN reveres dedicated to zodiac signs.
A cult consisted of people buying into something very close to eugenics masked as science doesn't sound it would have trouble gaining mainstream appeal in today's American society.
In fact, there's a great example of such discipline having already gained significant traction, even on this website, and it is none other than the field of evolutionary psychology. This field has provided close to zero replicable hypotheses yet it has been successfully weaponized into justifying prejudice and antisocial behavior, especially in the context of racial differences and dating.
Something like advertising reliable prediction of behaviors based on DNA would be cherry on top.
We are on the cusp of being able to plow through vast quantities of literature and data in an instant using multimodal machine learning models. Journal articles are written for people. The landscape is changing. We are headed toward a future where scientist upload data and thoughts en masse into the cloud to be consumed by interpreter models that in turn feed back into the scientific machine. Data quality and attribution (scientist performance rating) is automatically allocated by models.
We are on the cusp of being able to plow through vast quantities of literature and data in an instant using multimodal machine learning models. Journal articles are written for people. The landscape is changing. We are headed toward a future where scientist upload data and thoughts en masse into the cloud to be consumed by interpreter models that in turn feed back into the scientific machine. Data quality and attribution (scientist performance rating) is automatically allocated by models.
Randomness just introduces branch points into the linear flow of deterministic states. Since you do not control the branch points or create them, this does not give you free will.
Anyone with sufficient intellectual power to grok building AI must be fully aware of the monetization value of the same. If you are navel gazing over AIG taking over humanity you must first step through the stage were capital and AI couple up.
So it is not too much to ask since others who also were aware of the inherent unwanted social distortions that was entirely predictable were relying on these individuals and "non-profit" organizations to actually live up to their claims.
As it is, it seems like a thinly disguised propaganda to recruit and benefit from altruistic and capable workers in the field to then have Sam Altman (and whoever is behind him $$$) to parachute and take over and say "oh well, you can'tn expect people to be truthful and have principles! What are ya, a chump?"
Very nice work. We need brighter fluorescent protein tags that are more compact, in particular in the far red spectrum. The size of current fluorescent protein coding DNA sequences is out of reach of prime editing and still relies on less efficient gene editing technology.
There is only so much that you can get out of tinkering with naturally evolved proteins. I suspect that these kind of tools can be used to generate smaller & brighter FP's in the near future.
I think you're right. A large part of the joy from creative endevours is actually getting good at something, and having other people enjoy your work. In the face of instant high quality generative AI placating the entertainment needs of the masses, we are creating a society where most people are unable to enjoy human creative expression, in part because human artists are just too slow. Attention spans are already shrinking, and after getting used to generative AI, few people will have the patience to wait for an author to write the second part of his magnum opus.
