Thursday, June 18, 2015

THE TRANSHUMANISM SCRAPBOOK: THE GENOME IN THE CLOUD?

As most regular readers of this site are aware, I am highly skeptical of all the moves to digitize information and have records entirely in digital form. For me, the dangers for corporate and government mischeif here are all too palpable. It would be a Stalinist disinformation expert's deepest aspirations: editing the Soviet Encylopedia with the flick of a switch, so to speak. That troublesome picture of Yezhov and Stalin bothering the official narrative? Photoshop it out and digitally alter all digital copies. Forget about having to round up all the pre-purge physical copies of the encyclopedia embarassing to comrade Stalin. Just push the button and all those ebooks are automatically altered. You saved a screen copy of the old version? Try printing it out... oh, wait, the carbon tax on your paper printer are too high for you to afford, so you can't print out the evidence. Forget about sharing it online, because the data filtration algorithms will flag your screen copy, and automatically delete it before it has time to spread.
Now, imagine that power, coupled with the human genome, in this article shared by Mr. T.L.:
Google goes up against Amazon in billion dollar race to get your DNA into the cloud
Of course, this is all being promoted as yet another wonderful advance of technology (which, of course, it is):
That growth is being propelled by, among other forces, the push for personalized medicine, which aims to base treatments on a patient's DNA profile.
Making that a reality will require enormous quantities of data to reveal how particular genetic profiles respond to different treatments.
Already, universities and drug manufacturers are embarking on projects to sequence the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people.
The human genome is the full complement of DNA, or genetic material, a copy of which is found in nearly every cell of the body.
Clients view Google and Amazon as doing a better job storing genomics data than they can do using their own computers, keeping it secure, controlling costs and allowing it to be easily shared.(Emphasis added)
It's that "allowing it to be easily shared" part that bothers me, for the question is "easily shared with whom? and for what price? and how will this cata be protected? More importantly, with the recent advent of high tech genetic editing technologies, what will prevent "editing" being done to one's DNA secretly, under the guise of "personalized treatment" or, worse, to any genetic samples of one's DNA?
Follow my high octane speculation here and assume, for a moment, that cloning technology had been perfected, and that you had somehow upset the powers that be, who clone a version of you while you are removed to undergo "attitude adjustment" and "behavior modification" and "values clarification", and then are returned (hopefully!) to public life.
Worse yet, why store your DNA "in the cloud" at all? The action has the quality of that "heirloom seed bank" in Norway, a kind of "Noah's Ark" quality... or, perhaps even worse, the quality of a tribute being paid or some type of long range plan involving space, perhaps.
To put it "country simple," I have the impression, and it's nothing more than an intuition, that this is yet another "meme" being deliberately pushed, along with space mining and commercialization, alternative energy, "decarbonization" and a whole host of other memes. What it all adds up to is anyone's guess, but with the above speculations, you have some of mine...

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