Gattaca (1997) - Thoughts

I watched Gattaca (1997)¹.

"The most unremarkable of events. Jerome Morrow, Navigator First Class, is about to embark on a one-year manned mission to Titan, the fourteenth moon of Saturn. A highly prestigious assignment, although for Jerome, selection was virtually guaranteed at birth. He's blessed with all the gifts required for such an undertaking — a genetic quotient second to none. No, there is truly nothing remarkable about the progress of Jerome Morrow — except that I am not Jerome Morrow."²

Here are three notes I have on the movie.

1. The pettiness of Vincent’s ambition

2. Conditioned on imperfect technology,

3. Vincent vs. Cluely

The pettiness of Vincent’s ambition

Vincent has a heart condition that pegs his death at 30. When he leaves Earth, he’s 31. There’s a decent chance he dies on the one-year mission, leaving his crewmates with an unexpected, traumatic corpse to blast into the ether. Chilling.

But this doesn’t really matter, because there a lot of astronauts on his mission — presumably slightly more than needed?

Had Vincent’s role actually mattered — had he taken up a role critical to some project’s success — it would be much harder for us to sympathize with him as he hoovers up space center resources and assumes the role.

There are two types of ambition / aspiration. The first is to alter one’s position in the rocket ship / change the role one plays in society. The second is to alter the rocket ships that get launched / change what gets done and accomplished overall by society.

Because astronauts are relatively fungible and redundant (there’s no short supply in this technotopia), Vincent’s ambition is relatively petty, like a modern New Yorker’s:

New Yorkers are ambitious in a very solipsistic way–like, people there have dreams, but in a very “this is my dream for me” way. I think the people who have dreams for the world are more so in the Bay Area […].

A ‘shaping’ role — like that of Gattaca’s director, really, who cares very much about getting more spaceships launched — might’ve been more appropriate for someone in Vincent’s position. He could have a good run shifting resource allocation and ‘growing the pie’ while alive, then die abruptly without leaving anyone in the lurch.

God forbid his mission actually rely on him.

Conditioned on imperfect technology,

The movie relies on imperfect genomic prediction as a plot device:

• Director: “You won’t find a violent bone in my body” — yet murders.

• Vincent out-swims his brother Anton — twice.

• Vincent passes the intense ‘Navigator’ training regimen.³

• Vincent — supposed to have died — but he hasn’t.

• The civil servant isn’t shocked when Jerome shouts at him for testing him.

I think the significantly more interesting question is this:

What kind of interesting movie could you make ‘conditioned on perfect genetic-prediction technology’?⁴

Vincent vs. Cluely

Cluely (got to note it down now, because the company might not exist when some read this) is an early ‘AI meeting assistant’ that helps people ‘cheat in interviews’.

Vincent cheats in his interview by submitting a sample of Jerome’s urine for genetic screening. And ever after by submitting samples of Jerome’s blood, hair, irises, etc..

For a long time, we’ve been using screening tests and hoping they generalize off-distribution, i.e. in the job. Cluely is essentially adversarial pressure towards using more in-distribution tests — tests that better reflect tasks done on the job.

Vincent would not have needed Cluely: he was behaviorally identical to the science-children, merely genetically distinct.⁵

I think Cluely only makes any sense at all in a world where two people can be distinct on a screening gate but behaviorally indistinguishable on the job.⁶ That’s the world Vincent lives in —

modulo his life expectancy. The issue in Vincent’s case is he’s not actually obviously unfairly discriminated against — the ‘expected death at 30yo’ thing is a bit damning for an astronaut, and implies he prooobably shouldn’t have done what he did. But had it really solely been a case of society underestimating and discriminating against him, it would be almost trivial to cheer for him.

We of course want to fix screening gates in those worlds.

---

1997!

1. Thanks to a mention in Sophie’s excellent “The Many Lives of Inkhaven”, which I’m now halfway through.

2. ‘Jerome’ was exercising the second type of homeostasis — doing everything you might expect someone with his initial conditions to do. Although I’m not technodeterminist or sociodeterminist, I do, like many GMU-adjs, think genetics determine a lot. I also feel I got dealt an unreasonably good hand and have been trying to figure out what to do about it in the back of my head for a while.

3. This is a high-Randian ‘power of the individual’ show.

4. Such a movie seems less likely to contain angry / violent outbursts from Jerome, Anton, or Gattaca’s director. In this movie, Vincent actually wouldn’t have been able to make it through training.

5. He lives in a world of ‘non-identifiability’: one where two or more genomes (Jerome Morrow, Vincent Freeman) are observationally equivalent.

6. I don’t like the idea of tech like Cluely exposing everyone to longer screening processes where previously concise ones had enough predictive power.