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I don't get all the hate for Minority Report. If we ever had the capabilities their society had, we could structure our justice system in a vastly different way
by navait 11y ago
I don't get all the hate for Minority Report. If we ever had the capabilities their society had, we could structure our justice system in a vastly different way. If we know a violent crime was going to happen weeks before it actually did, crisis units could intervene. Jails would only be needed for those who could never change. Suicides would be a thing of the past. Police officers would drop a "shoot first" policy, and end many of the abuses we have today. Everyone would be better off.
Minority report's mistake is to assume we'll use old-fashioned police with new tech. But new technology allows us to change society in unimaginable ways.
- snowwrestler 11y agoThere are incredible technologies to predict crime now. The problem is that they require the government to collect huge amounts of information on people to inform the predictions. That's a trade-off that a lot of people are uncomfortable with, because sometimes the technology gets it wrong. And innocent people end up on the no-fly list, arrested, tracked, etc. Or worse, the system confuses political activism with actual criminality, and ends up protecting the status quo instead of just enforcing the law. I haven't seen Minority Report for a while, but I remember that being a big theme in that movie as well. Wasn't that the dilemma faced by Cruise's character? Go to jail to protect the system, or stand up and admit it is flawed.
- navait 11y agoWe don't have the technology to say "X will commit Y at place Z at time T". We have the technology to say "Person X is somewhat likely to be a terrorist based on known data". That's an important distinction - they only let traditional police do their jobs in a smarter way, not end their job as we know it.