Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 388 posts

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#361

Post by ladyattis »

cm2187 wrote: post #147

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.

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.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#362

Post by Swizec »

midoridensha wrote: post #346
Swizec wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#363

Post by Apofis »

cm2187 wrote: post #147

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.

Can't wait for the Homogenous Elite Society where everyone is a clone of each other.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#364

Post by CyberDildonics »

reducesuffering wrote: post #104
akira2501 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

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.

What are you basing this on?

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#365

Post by supercheetah »

Vecr wrote: post #44

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 actu…

I always took that as a hyperbole, and not something to be taken literally, and a foreshadowing of him showing them up on that point.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#366

Post by AussieWog93 »

midoridensha wrote: post #347
AussieWog93 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#367

Post by midoridensha »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #366
midoridensha wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#368

Post by midoridensha »

Swizec wrote: post #362
midoridensha wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#369

Post by midoridensha »

the_af wrote: post #360
midoridensha wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

True. George Lucas is the worst offender. Though Cameron hasn't shown a lot of restraint lately, and Ridley Scott has turned into the biggest cinematic disappointment in my life!

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.

Re: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

#370

Post by StillBored »

caskstrength wrote: post #350
StillBored wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> 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 mo…

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.

Post reply on HN