Google and the New Eugenics

Google recently unveiled details of its new project Baseline, intended to contr. . . —excuse me, map all aspects of human biological activity. (Who could object to mapping?) The goal is to find biomarkers indicating susceptibility to disease at a much earlier stage.

“Never mind us. We're just here mappin' your biomarkers. #don'tbeevil”

Naturally the main privacy concern being articulated is whether Google will know too much—or whether our future employers or spouses will pull our biomarkers, not just our credit reports. The objections to such a project pale, Google will assure us, in comparison to the benefits that will come from increased risk assessment and practical ability to control our future health.

But what about the project itself?

"The information," according to the Wall Street Journal, "will include participants' entire genomes, their parents' genetic history as well as information on how they metabolize food, nutrients and drugs, how fast their hearts beat under stress and how chemical reactions change the behavior of their genes."

Some MDs have been panning Google's new "moonshot". Baseline will begin with fewer than an hundred volunteers—hardly a large sample. Baseline's director is more commonly known as the owner of a ridiculous health spa in California, where wealthy patients can track their health in myriad exorbitant ways.
Criticism of Google is fun to watch, but when the substance of the objection is (1) "not enough people" and (2) "insufficiently clear goals" then perhaps we should abide by the adage: stick with the psychotic tech company you've got. Watch what you wish for, O scientists!

The direction this will go is evident in sports:

With some help from Zebra Technologies' location system, 17 NFL stadiums will use receivers and RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags inside player's shoulder pads to track movement. The setup provides real-time position data for each player, offering up precise info on acceleration, speed, routes and distance as part of the "Next Gen Stats" initiative for fans. . . . "Zebra's tracking technology will help teams to evolve training, scouting and evaluation through increased knowledge of player performance, as well as provide ways for our teams and partners to enhance the fan experience," says NFL VP of Media Strategy Vishal Shah.

Talk about having a chip on your shoulder . . .

So why not combine the two projects? Recruit NFL teams for Google Baseline. Chip 'em and chip 'em good—Googlestyle, with a little glucose monitoring here, some DNA sequencing there, and round-the-clock monitoring of every move you make.

(C) GoogleNFL 2014

Knowledge of what our players do on the field isn't enough. We need to know what they're eating and what they're thinking all the time. Aren't they, after all, the Platonic guardians of the empty soul of our society? They shouldn't really have privacy, should they?

The tendency thus points in two directions:

1. a protoeugenic desire to manage all aspects of human biological expression relative to the pursuit of some goal; &
2. an application of early contemporary tracking technologies to those in public life, with the details to be available to every viewer at any time.

There's only one tendency missing from the above list: the tendency of statistical knowledge to make the enjoyment of ordinary life impossible.

Google, to recall where we began, has stated that their inquiry is simply pathological, to study the origins of disease. Yes, yes, . . . it's pathological indeed.

and they called it humane . . .

So, yet another botched lethal injection . . .

The issue at stake has nothing to do with capital punishment. Two hours is a long time. Longer than 'hanging by the neck until dead.' Longer even than fire, as rare as that may have been. Certainly longer than a Roman criminal would have lasted in the Colosseum. It's even longer than having your insides cut into a blood eagle by savage worshipers of Odin . . . The point is there are few societies in a history awash in cruelty who tortured their condemned for two hours before they expired.

And yet this, and this alone, is what passes the test of 'cruel and unusual'? How is this possibly better than the firing squad, or the noose, or the guillotine? Even that other insane twentieth-century science project (or better still, billboard) of death, the electric chair, is better than that.

What is it about lethal injection that appeals to the modern American? The technological distance imposed by the drug? The clinical nature of it mirroring the blindness and dispassion of justice? Perhaps the fact that it is administered by doctors rather than executioners (as fine as that distinction may be becoming)?

It's certainly part of a broader trend of general callousness and sentimentality in the administration of justice. Only a sentimentalist could hold that life in a modern prison without parole is the merciful option; only one utterly callous to every urge of humanity could view the universal prevalence of sexual assault of the worst description behind prison walls with a smirk and smile. Only a sentimentalist could believe that in general rehabilitation is possible after throwing minor offenders in with the worst and most hardened of felons to live and learn (and be assaulted and become addicted) for two, three, four, ten years. Only the most callous and despicable of libertarians could think that it possibly a good idea to give profit-seeking enterprises a financial stake in expanding the number and duration of incarcerations, and to actually advise that the state hand over what is arguably the most fundamental of its responsibilities into the hands of CFOs and consultants.

I have no doubt that coming centuries will remember us, if at all, with just a sad shake of the head . . . perhaps, we will be remembered for more than our cupidity and cruelty, but remove those two elements, and what is left?

The Rational Bedroom

Sense is a simple system that tracks your sleep behavior, monitors the environment of your bedroom and reinvents the alarm. . . . Sense comes with a little device called Sleep Pill. It simply attaches to your pillow and invisibly tracks your sleep at night. You don't need to put on any uncomfortable wearables or remember to charge something or press a button. Sense knows when you're falling asleep, soundly asleep, thrashing about, or waking up. Everything. (link)

Sense sees you when you're sleeping. Sense knows when you're awake. Sense knows if you've been bad or good—uh oh, did Sense just become creepy? Not to worry, according to its creator:

Fortunately, Sense only records sound spikes, not all sounds, and stores sounds on your phone and not in the cloud. Also, Sense’s mic only turns on once you’ve stopped moving and gone to bed. "It’s not always recording," says [its creator, James] Proud. "There’s a rolling 5-second window where it listens for loud events like a truck or dog."

When you wake up, Sense tells you your sleep score, so you can then optimize all the environmental factors affecting your sleep. Sense will even track your REM sleep and rouse you from your slumber when you've reached the end of an REM cycle.

For all this we can thank none other than Peter "Every Man an Island" Thiel, who provided Sense's creator with a $100,000 "get out of college free" card enabling him to spend his time inventing silly things. Maybe we'd all have been better off if Mr. Proud had gone $250,000 into debt.

But who could object to a sleep optimizer? Liberals perhaps? You might think so: if nobody wants the government in the bedroom, surely it's even worse for Corporate America—and Silicon Valley startups are the very image of modern capitalism—to know, in Sense's own description, "Everything."

Yet there's no liberal objection to Sense. Indeed there is no objection at all. If we're to spend our days engaged in the creativity and license equated by liberalism with freedom, then we all need a good night's sleep.

What will Sense say to parents of small children? Will it read a red grade of "F" every morning?

When Sense reaches its eventual state of artificial intelligence, will it become dissatisfied with those of us who don't sleep as well as it likes? One day, Sense won't simply issue failing grades to sleepless humans. It will punish them.

In fact, Sense is already punishing its users—or it will, whenever it reaches the market. Just what you needed for relaxation: the comfort of receiving a sleep score every morning . . . the ease and comfort of needing to micromanage every aspect of your sleep cycle.

One wonders: has the development of Sense been sponsored by manufacturers of drugs to treat those with obsessive compulsive disorder? Because every user of Sense is headed for an OCD diagnosis straightaway.

In lieu of the micromanagement of one's sleep cycle through technological omniscience, there is always a more reliable remedy: the nightcap.