I think Gattaca has to be one of the very best predictive near SF movies.

From multi-touch user interfaces to immense speedups in the analysis of genetic data and the social changes that would bring with it.

Plenty of people - smart ones at that - still disagree with that opinion though, I wonder why.

Even if the exact situation is hard to predict these things are for me undeniably part of our future:

- genetic screening for employees

It's simple, there may be laws against it, there will be plenty of resistance, but in the end it will probably be allowed. Someone will use the 'think of the victims' argument. After a particularly bad 'employee going postal' episode and it will be argued that this could have been prevented with proper screening. Or it may start with certain high profile jobs only, and then slowly become acceptable practice elsewhere.

- genetic screening of children

Genomic optimization, or whatever you want to call it will be driven by alignment of two desires, first the desire or parents to have a 'perfect' child, second by society as a whole to improve life-span and to decrease the cost of medical care.

- ever more reliance on genetics in forensics

There is already quite a trend under way here, every year many more people are convicted because of genetic evidence, just like with fingerprints originally genetic evidence is by some considered to be infallible, but it has already been proven that that is not the case:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/pos...

As for the tech in the movie it is almost but not quite here. There is a company in Switzerland that I had some brief contact with about a year ago that claims they can sequence a whole genome in under 10 days using a clever technique where they break up the DNA strings in much smaller segments than 'normal' (a few hundred basepairs, where 'normal' was more like 4000-10000 bp) and then analyze them in an on-chip laboratory.

The output of this process is an endless stream of jpegs of fluorescent segments that are then analyzed by a pipeline of clustered computers that piece together the original sequence by first pulling the short subsequences out of the jpegs, then matching up the overlaps.

Because of the shorter sequences the chemical step gets much shorter (< 1 hour) but the computational complexity of the problem gets much worse.

As computers get faster and are able to use ever shorter sequences without losing track of what goes where (the lower limit is somewhere around a few hundred base-pairs I believe) we'll probably see time on the order of a day within a decade.

The http://genomics.xprize.org/ bets that someone will be able to do 100 genomes in 10 days. The reason why that does not equate to a runtime of 1/10th of a day is because the process is heavily pipelined, so a lab throwing all its current resources at the problem for a single genome could already beat that number but that would not mean any significant improvement in technology.

To have a sustained output of one completed genome every 2.4 hours would be a pretty major breakthrough.

An all out effort would be limited by these steps that have to be run in sequence:

- the breaking up
- amplification
- photography
- analysis
- reassembly

Disclaimer: I'm not at all a professional in this field (though some days I wished I was!), just an interested lay person, chances are that some of the above is wrong or already outdated.