Tag Archives: responsibility

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Social Media. It’s a catch phrase that used to carry with it so much promise. You could keep up to date with friends across the world from the comfort of your home and in your own time. Then came the social games, which offered the chance to play games with all your online friends and gain in-game rewards for the amount of people you had attached to your “friends” list. Then came the gamification of knowledge, with its badges of honour for depth of knowledge as awarded by your peers. Then … Then came this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D5fB5d2mqnc

Now, at first I suspected it was a parody, or a prank being played by a group of hilarious friends… Not so. I went to the website and had a look around.

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Looks fairly innocent, right? Well, let’s look further…

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Ummmmm… So, you’re just the platform on which this craziness can occur, but you accept no responsibility if anyone gets hurt, or if anything illegal happens.

THAT’S MADNESS!!!

See, this is the fundamental flaw that most people seem to not realise about the interwebs. All that stuff we skip past called the Terms Of Service? Yeah, that actually is just a document (for the most part) about how we, the user, accepts all responsibility for the stuff we do through these various services, but that the services themselves accept no responsibility for … well … much at all really.

Service outages? Not their problem.

Damage occurring from use of service? Not their problem.

Illegal activity performed on their service? Not their problem.

Making sure that all challenges are sane, safe and not illegal? Completely the user’s problem! Because we users have been so good in the past at keeping that in mind when doing stupid things on the intertubes.

I think this situation deserves:

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Now, I know that writing about this will provide the site with a multitude of hits, which is exactly what it wants in order to justify its existence. The reason I’m writing, rather than ignoring, is that people I know will sign up to this stupidity and then I’ll be forced to hear about it more… Also, people will sign up without reading the ToS (because that’s what we all do) and will get hurt, try to sue and be slapped in the face with the stupid fish.

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Gattacca – coming to a world near you.

So I happened to come across this article this afternoon and it kinda scared me.

We’re heading down Genetics Lane without a map. – by lousia_catlover

Not because I don’t think it’ll do amazing things for the medical field. Not because I think it’ll serve to save lives (eventually). Not because I think it looks a little too “Tron” for my liking. More because I think it’ll bring us one step closer to the world shared in the film Gattaca.

For those not familiar with the plot (and without spoilers, because I think EVERYONE needs to see this film), the future is a world controled by your genome. Babies are no longer born without careful screening for future medical conditions (well, rarely and if they are, they’re at a significant disadvantage). You don’t just fall in love with someone. You nab yourself a DNA sample and have their genome compatibility matched to you, THEN you fall in love with them. You don’t get jobs based on the merit of your work. Instead, promotions are based on the decency of your genetic make up to that particular position. It’s frightening stuff… and it’s becoming more and more real.

We have in utero screening which, trust me, I think is a good thing. With this kind of a machine though, I can see a time in the not too distant future where people have the genomes of their babies mapped out in the first trimester and decide from there whether or not to continue to full term. While I am sure this would save a world of heartache and pain, is it really the best thing? If one thing leads to another as we have seen in the past, the chances of the world becoming a genetic competition in more than the most base of levels is very possible.

We just need to remain responsible for the advancements of genetic research. – by Sean Graham.

And I’m not the only on who feels this way. This post by Symon Perriman (apologies for the screen options – highlight it to read), and this commentary by Jason Lipshin are just two of a multitude of writings on the dystopian idea that our future is one set to weed out genetic inferiority by way of selective breeding. We have done it to animals and plants. It is only a small step in logic to extend the idea to humans.

The greatest hurdle, of course, will be “ethics”. In my mind, I can see a persuasive argument build for progressive implementation of the technology to give parents the choice to reduce the risk of their child having a burdensome and debilitating genetic disease, causing excessive drains on an already tired public health system. From there it is a series of small steps to break down even further opposition to have genetic screening implemented prior to conception for each couple, as an extension of marriage applications.

I guess rather than saying it’s good or bad, I am trying to say that technology is being developed so quickly that our morals, mores and values cannot keep up with it. Rather than asking it to slow down, perhaps it is time that we learned to really think about the extended ramifications of the advancement of technology upon our society.