DNA is the key
By: Abdel Abdellaoui
Tags: Genetics, Future, Cryptocurrency, Dna, Science Fiction

“That route is long and dangerous dad, and those smugglers don’t care about you one bit. It’s not worth the risk, please…” He realized that he would probably never see his father again.

“I used to be the richest man in the world… My business is still successful, yet last year our maid made more money than me!” his father said with an angry voice.

“Always with the maid… her genes predicted that she would never be able to keep a job, and she’s never skipped a working day for more than a decade now. She really earned that raise.”

“It’s not just that.. Even the Olympics are now split up by genetic potential. This has gone too far. Isn’t effort also supposed to be heritable? All behaviour is heritable to some extent right?”

“They take that into account dad. Look, the incentive is clearly more effective this way, most people try to maximize their potential. They studied this, and it works. Our country has never been more productive. We should just accept this system and show some more effort!”

“More effort? Intelligence, creativity, wit, personality, that’s what makes us human, that’s what made us conquer the world, not more effort! We’re not farm animals.” He hung up the phone.

“Dad!” His father was gone, on his way to make the illegal crossing to the Old World. On his way to a fleet of anxious, and highly talented, refugees scheduled to leave at 1 AM. It was a dark and misty summer night, the coast was deserted, and the boats were visible only through the nervous flashlights. The destination was Europe, which was still running on the old capitalist system and eager to receive and reward talented immigrants.

About two decades earlier, the BoltArray, a portable and cheap DNA sequencer, had been introduced that could read out an entire human genome on the spot, including the measurement of epigenetic markers. The dynamic nature of epigenetic markers made it possible to distinguish even identical twins and could serve as an extra safety measure against identity theft. Inspired by an old obscure science-fiction story published on Medium, an anonymous hackers collective introduced BoltCoin, a new cryptocurrency that could form the backbone of a new socio-economic system in combination with the BoltArray. The cryptocurrency uses a combination of one’s DNA and epigenetics profile as the “private key” to “unlock” one’s transactions and prove that one is indeed the owner of the cryptocurrency sent or received in the transaction. The decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency helped further ensure privacy and made it very hard to take advantage of. It didn’t take long before enough people switched to BoltCoin to make the dollar obsolete. The big promise of cryptocurrency had finally come true, ushering in a new era through a massive redistribution of wealth.

The waves were loud and the passengers silent. They felt each other’s anxiety increase as the boats were getting ready to leave. There were between twenty and thirty medium-sized boats filled with passengers that brought, as instructed, only their backpacks with bare necessities. As they were leaving, the captain broke the silence like a general speaking courage into his soldiers before going into battle: “This ain’t my first crossing fellas. I’ll get you back safely to being appreciated again for your talent. Your greatness is of no less value because it was predicted by some algorithm. A world where greatness is not appreciated is doomed for mediocrity!”

Two weeks later, a professor and her student were staring at a series of graphs on their screens titled breeding values of socio-economic outcomes. “Professor, the genetic scores keep getting weaker… if it were just statistical fluctuations as you said, why does it only go downwards? Could environmental influences be changing somehow? You always told us, the stronger the environment, the weaker the effects of the genes, right?” She smiled at the professor expecting an approving nod, but she got the opposite.

The professor was in charge of research that directly influenced the distribution of BoltCoin. Human behaviour is influenced by a combination of many thousands of genes with very small effects and environmental influences. Everyone’s DNA sequence and all of their socio-economic activities were recorded in the decentralized blockchain system of BoltCoin. This meant that the effect of every individual DNA variant on any of the recorded activities could be estimated using data from literally all citizens in the system. These genetic effects were dynamic, dependent on environmental circumstances and on the rest of human activity, so they were constantly updated in real-time. They were used to estimate someone’s total genetic potential for succeeding in the socio-economic system. Financial rewards were weighted based on that genetic potential, in order to reduce the benefits of being lucky enough to be born with the right genes. This made effort more valuable than talent.

“I need to make a phone call” the professor said. She went into her office and closed the door. “Hello General, sir, I saw another dip in average genetic scores today, consistent with higher genetic potential leaving the dataset. These dips seem to be getting .. well .. more frequent. They’re still very small, but so consistent, even my student is starting to notice. She hasn’t considered the brain drain as an explanation yet though. She thinks it may be the environment that’s changing.”

“Hello professor. Thank you and yes we know. Another fleet tried to leave two weeks ago. This was a big one. We took care of it, no worries. We can’t have more talent leak out to Europe. Listen, we’re starting to build quite the database of attempted escapees… if I were to give you a list of their IDs, could you look into whether we can use those to predict the genetic risk for attempted escape?”