HACKER Q&A
📣 _448

AI and Eugenics


I was watching an interview with a person from the AI field. The interviewer asked the person about what advancements are happening within the AI field, and on topic of health, in addition to other advancements, he mentioned that there are application that will help people identify, based on DNA analysis, who they should marry and what type of offspring they will have. This sounds like eugenics, isn't it?


  👤 anenefan Accepted Answer ✓
No that sounds more like breeding management to ensure no bad cross where unwanted recessive gene is dominant with not so good consequences. Eugenics has a different aim to improve the general population by having some breed and convincing others that they should not have any or many kids.

Eugenics often doesn't present and identify itself clearly - as such the kids in my district were subject in the 70s to some well meaning souls who targeted the 11 to 13 school kids on a yearly basis, talked to boys and girls separately about how over populated the country (Australia) was and responsibility not to have kids [a] ... but the real focus was on the girls who received a very much longer session, each told to varying degrees due to over population they should not have too many kids, one or two and consider abortion if they got pregnant. This might not have been so harmless in city areas where kids might have witnessed most of these problems, but for rural girls in small districts, while most shrugged it off, it left a lasting impression on a few which had an impact on their interactions later in life.

[a] That was my personal message I was told - as a kid I wasn't a pretty picture, face scarred up bad from injury when I was 4 and for many fitted a certain look some might think I was a few cookies short.


👤 pfisherman
You should find some other content to watch. The person being interviewed sounds like a charlatan who is bullshitting and has no clue what they are talking about.

As someone who has does applied AI in genomics as a profession, I can assure you that this is among the least useful / valuable / profitable applications.


👤 mfld
Note that there is already an application that helps people identify, based on DNA analysis, who they should NOT date (Islendiga-App). However, I cannot imagine that the opposite would provide any practical nor useful application.