Is DNA the Next Social Media-Like Juggernaut Destined to Fill Us with Regret?

As technology pushes DNA to extremes, unintended consequences are inevitable.

I’m old enough to remember Facebook emerging in Silicon Valley in the 2000s.

I’m a Silicon Valley marketer, and social media was the promise of something great: a way to establish “relationships” with our customers. And it was free! Imagine my clients and their dream of cheap marketing. Guy Kawasaki was a social media monster, writing The Art of Social Media in 2014 and setting insane expectations for the marketing people who had to clean up after his enthusiasm.

Courtesy of pxhere.

Fast forward to 2021, and we’re all realizing this elixir has a high rate of toxicity. From amplification algorithms that reward vitriol, controversy, and gossip, to the threat against our democracy as bad actors who use it to tell lies and bully others, we are in trouble. This exploitation includes our paid civil servants responsible for writing and enforcing laws.

Social media is a juggernaut that cries out for regulation. But remember how our financial system was “too big to fail” in 2008? It seems we’re at the same point with social media, perhaps for different reasons, but the result is the same. Joanna Stern explains why stopping this hot mess isn’t likely to happen.

But at the heart of it all, this is still a gigantic technology problem: Computers are in charge of what we see and they’re operating without transparency. > read article

The point is, we unleashed the Kraken without genuinely understanding what could happen as technology evolved, the world continued to change. Bad actors seized the opportunity to exploit the tool for evil.

DNA today is roughly Facebook in 2014. Everyone is excited and jumping in with both feet.

I have a horse in this race. DNA convicted the man who killed my dad and stepmother. The sample matched came from inside my stepmom’s body. It was a 100% match. Over 40 years, DNA first connected him to a series of murders in southern California and then to a series of rapes in Northern…