4 ms·

Check out a great sci-fi movie named Gattaca. Remember that you shed cells everywhere you go, so soon the tech will be advanced enough where we can do nearly r

Check out a great sci-fi movie named Gattaca. Remember that you shed cells everywhere you go, so soon the tech will be advanced enough where we can do nearly real-time DNA matching. If you sneeze, a sniffer could pick that up and figure out who you are. Imagine a camera that films not things that are visible, but people who were there, at that protest, in that store, in that hospital, boarding that plane. It's practically irrefutable (or currently legally is, even though it's inherently flawed.) And you can never change that identifier. Once that data is out, it's out. The last headline in that article, "Solving Crime Before It Happens" could have easily been entitled "Minority Report" (another great sci-fi movie that's not so fictitious anymore.)

foxyv 3y ago
The thing that broke my brain about Minority Report is, that after stopping the murder, they could have just let the people go a few days later. The person would know they couldn't get away with the crime and then wander off to take up pottery or whatever. Instead they Haloed them all for no good reason. No victim to seek retribution and no reason to restrain them any more. At the same time, when you look at real life justice systems through the same lens we look at Gattaca and Minority Report it looks even more bizarre. We are pretty much running criminal training camps almost designed to make people more criminal, and then after they get out of the camps we structure our society to almost force them back into crime to survive. It's bonkers.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  But it's very very profitable.
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  If you are called the 'Justice' system you are out of a job when there's no longer a need to implement 'Justice' because you solved the issue higher up the food chain. Why would they put themselves out of work?
- rolph 3y ago
  thought crimes: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol118/iss5/4/ https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol118/iss5/4/ https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5394&context=mlr https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... [PDF]
- Joeri 3y ago
  Politicians don’t get votes for reducing crime, they get votes for being tough on crime. Building out ever larger repression systems instead of investing in prevention and rehabilitation is the better political strategy.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  It seems bonkers, until you realize that that person who gets 5 years in prison for his 4th petty shoplifting offense is generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of checks being written to people who work within and who are contractors for the justice system. And on the streets, fighting crime is another place where massive checks are written in order to protect the public from small-time street and property crime. If people are robbing other people for $100, especially in 2023 dollars, that's too stupid to be a failure of society, that has to be because small-time crime is a resource for a lot of justice system-connected industries, and as long as maintaining the level of it doesn't pit those industries against real estate interests, they can lobby for crime. I think there are really three kinds of crime: 1) Crimes of need, where people need to feed themselves or their loved ones, so resort to crime because they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom, 2) Crimes of stupidity, where people just don't understand how unlikely they are to get away with something, or how bad the punishment could be, so they undervalue the cost of undertaking those crimes for the benefit they stand to gain, and 3) Crimes of compulsion, where people have enough, and mostly understand the costs and the benefits, yet risk their lives and freedom for more for some irrational reason; degenerate gamblers. We can prevent all crimes of need immediately and easily. It's more difficult to prevent crimes of stupidity, but pouring education into everyone is the answer. It's idiopathic crimes of compulsion that are hard to deal with, because people have wildly different reasons for their compulsions. As a society, we pour all of our efforts into crimes of compulsion, the only kind of crime that we're virtually guaranteed to be ineffective at stopping, and bad at controlling. Where the discussions between political factions are about whether we should kill them, give them therapy, drug them, corral them far away from people, let you look them up on a website after they're free, refuse them work, let them vote, etc., in the context of assuming that the vast majority of crime has unique causes and solutions. To assume that, we have to ignore that people are still sticking other people up for $100.
  - gunapologist99 3y ago
    You forgot the crimes of "I can get away with it", or else perhaps you don't live in San Francisco or Jalisco or Sinaloa.
  - whatshisface 3y ago

foxyv 3y ago

The thing that broke my brain about Minority Report is, that after stopping the murder, they could have just let the people go a few days later. The person would know they couldn't get away with the crime and then wander off to take up pottery or whatever. Instead they Haloed them all for no good reason. No victim to seek retribution and no reason to restrain them any more. At the same time, when you look at real life justice systems through the same lens we look at Gattaca and Minority Report it looks even more bizarre. We are pretty much running criminal training camps almost designed to make people more criminal, and then after they get out of the camps we structure our society to almost force them back into crime to survive. It's bonkers.

anigbrowl 3y ago
But it's very very profitable.
ROTMetro 3y ago
If you are called the 'Justice' system you are out of a job when there's no longer a need to implement 'Justice' because you solved the issue higher up the food chain. Why would they put themselves out of work?
rolph 3y ago
thought crimes: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol118/iss5/4/ https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol118/iss5/4/ https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5394&context=mlr https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... [PDF]
Joeri 3y ago
Politicians don’t get votes for reducing crime, they get votes for being tough on crime. Building out ever larger repression systems instead of investing in prevention and rehabilitation is the better political strategy.
pessimizer 3y ago
It seems bonkers, until you realize that that person who gets 5 years in prison for his 4th petty shoplifting offense is generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of checks being written to people who work within and who are contractors for the justice system. And on the streets, fighting crime is another place where massive checks are written in order to protect the public from small-time street and property crime. If people are robbing other people for $100, especially in 2023 dollars, that's too stupid to be a failure of society, that has to be because small-time crime is a resource for a lot of justice system-connected industries, and as long as maintaining the level of it doesn't pit those industries against real estate interests, they can lobby for crime. I think there are really three kinds of crime: 1) Crimes of need, where people need to feed themselves or their loved ones, so resort to crime because they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom, 2) Crimes of stupidity, where people just don't understand how unlikely they are to get away with something, or how bad the punishment could be, so they undervalue the cost of undertaking those crimes for the benefit they stand to gain, and 3) Crimes of compulsion, where people have enough, and mostly understand the costs and the benefits, yet risk their lives and freedom for more for some irrational reason; degenerate gamblers. We can prevent all crimes of need immediately and easily. It's more difficult to prevent crimes of stupidity, but pouring education into everyone is the answer. It's idiopathic crimes of compulsion that are hard to deal with, because people have wildly different reasons for their compulsions. As a society, we pour all of our efforts into crimes of compulsion, the only kind of crime that we're virtually guaranteed to be ineffective at stopping, and bad at controlling. Where the discussions between political factions are about whether we should kill them, give them therapy, drug them, corral them far away from people, let you look them up on a website after they're free, refuse them work, let them vote, etc., in the context of assuming that the vast majority of crime has unique causes and solutions. To assume that, we have to ignore that people are still sticking other people up for $100.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  You forgot the crimes of "I can get away with it", or else perhaps you don't live in San Francisco or Jalisco or Sinaloa.
- whatshisface 3y ago