Sparked by – Fake Restaurant Promotion Helps Nab Suspect In 36-Year-Old Florida Cold Case Murder
This concept just absolutely floored me, the idea of collecting DNA from everyone, legally, and without their knowledge or consent, is as simple as running a free food promotion. Maybe the new title for handing out samples at Costco could one day be “sample harvester”.
This has me floored because while our DNA may not be able to predict specific behavior, we will evolve this enough that our DNA can predict preferences. And assuming those preferences generally drive the behavioral response, we likely will get to a point where harvesting DNA will provide a better map of behavioral function than you yourself have.
This conceit isn’t exactly new, for the past decade people have willingly sent in their DNA to companies selling reports (of varying validity) about processing preferences. As we get better at understanding the metabolic cascade and it’s interactions, the granularity (and validity) of preferences we can infer will dramatically increase.
Much in the same way that companies harvest metadata on a mass scale to produce inferences about your external behavior (sometimes with ridiculous accuracy), we are potentially moving into an era of understanding your internal preferences, including the things you do not share.
And much like metadata, your direct participation won’t even be necessary once an adequate database has been built up.
This combination of expressed behavior (metadata) * preferences (DNA) will provide a pathway toward manipulating your behavior toward their goal in a truly “subconscious” fashion. Whether this be authoritarian governments manipulating it’s citizens to conform to a political norm, or Costco steering you toward buying a specific product (despite you “knowing better”), this is a truly new world.
All of this feels like we are in a foot race to unlock the mechanics of behavior to allow individuals to develop the tools to defeat this type of manipulation before it’s subsumed culturally and we lose any concept of “free will”.
I’m still tickled by the idea that regional variation of microbiota may actually be driving social behavior as high level/abstract as specific products on the market. Regional variations of microbes drive individual preferences, collective individual preferences drive group preferences, that drives product development, and the spread of those products creates a favorable environment for the spread of those microbiota.
The idea that we are fancy puppets, inventing ways for microbiota to have more granular control over our behavior, despite our arrogance and self assuredness that we are the center of the universe is pretty hilarious.
Perhaps the concept of god begins in our gut.