RE: What is so bad about "Precrime"?
January 5, 2013 at 11:19 pm
(This post was last modified: January 5, 2013 at 11:28 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(January 4, 2013 at 4:38 am)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: Spoilers ahoy if you haven't seen Minority Report.
I just saw Minority Report for the first time a few weeks ago. I'm not sure what is so awful about "Precrime" in principle. In the movie, it was a faulty system whose faults were being covered up, but assuming such a system were to work flawlessly or close to flawlessly (like 98 or 99 percent), I can't find anything wrong with it.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Firstly, read Minority Report...much better (I can email you a mobi if you like).
Now, precrime is not, exactly, thought crime (the precogs read the future, not peoples minds). The movie makes it seem as though it were a flawed system, that the flaws were being concealed, but such is not strictly speaking the case in the original narrative. The only flaw, the only fault being covered up (that the reader is made explicitly aware of anyway)- was the one that provided the engine for the narrative. The perpetrators of this cover up, this crime, had to spoof the system precisely because it -did- work.
There's a great line "They always claim to be innocent, and in a sense, they are". The reason that I love (and no, love is not too strong a word) this particular story is the question you might ask from it. Not whether or not a person is innocent or guilty, but what sense of innocence or guilt are we chiefly concerned with, and how far - one way or the other- are we willing to go in pursuing that interest. I think DBP summed it up pretty well but I'd add, how strong a measure of prevention are we willing to leverage in defense of a theoretical crime (and how strong would the evidence or reason need to be to justify it's use)?
If I were 99.9% certain that you, Tea, in 14 years, would commit an act of premeditated murder, would you be comfortable with my bringing you up on charges of premeditated murder today (while your theoretical victim was still breathing)? Has any murder been committed with which to charge you? Is my promise of your future crime to a jury actually strong enough for that jury to convict you (not that juries featured all that heavily mind you...but PKD was all about dystopia). If you're uncomfortable placing yourself in the shoes of the accused, than the lesson ought to be that you should not place yourself in the jury box behind some other individual, accused of the same crime on the same evidence. Not that you should render a verdict of not guilty, but that you should refuse to accept the validity of the charge in the first place. That's one way of taking it anyway.
Now, in the story, it was an issue of precognitive ability, but what if I could offer the same level of certainty with statistical analysis, would you be comfortable convicting a person of a crime that they were statistically very likely (99.9%) to commit? There's a less dramatic implication here as well, and one that some biographers have mentioned with regards to this story, that PKD felt that some people were being sentenced (when they had committed crimes) for crimes they had not yet committed. Longer or more harsh sentences for people who the court felt were more likely to commit future crimes-the notion that they were clearly going to be repeat offenders. The idea being to get them off the streets (and keep them off the streets longer). Alot of it to do with drug culture, by the by.
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