Crime Prevention

“Being a detective isn't about bringing someone down; rather, it should be about protecting someone.” Enforcer Shinya Kogami, Ep2

In the first episode, Akane’s instinct was to protect the victim, and she even knew how to manipulate the Sibyl System so the woman would get paralyzed rather than injured or killed, but she had to explain her choices. Is the Sibyl System of Psycho-Pass a more or less effective system of crime prevention than the Precrime of Minority Report? Additionally, what does the concept of stopping crimes before they happen say about human nature?

[Incoherent Weebshit]

So this is a fairly basic discussion question, but what do people think of Psycho-Pass so far? I’m specifically wondering where people think the show will go from here, what they think of the world-building, and whether or not they plan to watch beyond the required episodes. I will say that even if you don’t watch the whole first season, it’s worth it to at least look over a synopsis of the episodes we skip because a lot happens in those. This is one of my favorite anime series, and I’m pretty excited to hear your thoughts!

New Life

Unwind proposes that unwound individuals continue to live, despite being sectioned off and transplanted into other bodies. While biologically, their tissue survives, their mind almost certainly does not. Even today, however, we look at family members who have died and donated their organs as living a new life within the person their flesh now resides. Is this at all an appropriate way to view the donation of body parts, within Unwind or our own society?

New York Times X/XX/20XX

*the following is a fictional New York Times Op-Ed, presenting an argument against the "Bill of Life" at the end of the Heartland War

TOTAL INSANITY!!

The proposed so-called "Bill of Life" fails entirely to understand the basic arguments which sparked the current conflict. Nobody on the pro-choice side is there because the have a desire to abort children, and if the pro-life side is really so convinced that life is sacred, they would never consent to something as lunatic as a "safe period" followed by total ownership through the easily abused teenage years when who knows how many would be "unwound" simple because their parents got tired of dealing with moody, rebellious children? What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to believe that someone is still alive when they've been chopped up and spread around as transplants? Yes, their body parts still live, but the person they were is dead.

Unwinding the Threads of the Individual

What I find fascinating about Unwind is its suitability as an allegory for our questions on whether a utopia should, or commonly does, focus on the community's happiness compared to the individual. Minority Report allowed us to reflect on how, if a system cannot protect the rights or freedom of the individual, then it can hardly hold up to defending and protecting a communal entity. This society distributes the essence and/or the body parts of the 'few' to support and aid the many and satisfy a standstill of war (and for health or whatever else one needs new parts for). Teenagers, willingly or unwillingly, are literally pieced into empty slots, sewn into muscle in ways that ensure and reveal their importance - for whatever purpose, this is a world that needs the sacrifice of the few, the young and troublesome and abandoned, in order to function with its set rules and expectations. I am heavily reminded of Omelas, where the one poor child's suffering is merely a shackled necessity, known and winced at, but still ongoing. There are plenty of characters who seem against unwinding but are unable to dent the norm of the practice, at least not in the beginning (Lev's brother, Connor, even the boeuf boy who leans away at the reveal of Risa's situation).

This is a world in which an individual is made a commodity regardless of the 'noble' intentions unwinding serves, or however religious it is made out to be. Children who are not as perfect as others like Risa, or troublesome and below expectations like Connor, or conditioned to be a lucky chosen one like Lev, are all cogs in a wheel of reassignment and an avoidance of mortality - or at least the idea of it. I wonder if this text showcases the ongoing question we have about the goals of a utopia and whether community or individuality is more valued (look at Lev's 'bad thoughts' on page 32 as an example). I'm also curious about how much unwinding has to do with the good of others when the main message purported to the utopians is that the individual selected achieves a place of simultaneous remarkability and infinity whilst being subsumed and assimilated.

Discussion Question for Unwind

While I wholeheartedly think that children between the ages of 13-18 being unwound is horrifying and completely immoral, do you think that having criminals, who committed terrible crimes (rape, murder, etc.) unwound is any more justified?

Minority Report

That's So Raven!!

Obviously Raven sees the future, but this particular gif makes me think of Precrime's attitude toward the criminals because of the visions of the precogs. It doesn't matter if they did what they might have been about to do - they just have to deal with it.

My Minority Report Report

While watching this movie, I found the individual versus community question to be in my head a lot. What's interesting is that the Precrime justice system is being advertised as a protective tool for both the community as a whole (the kids at the ending of the advertisement), as well as for the individual (all of the people saying where they would have been stabbed or whatever). However, the consequences of Precrime directly affect the individual; when a pre-criminal is caught and haloed, they are put into an eternal sleep-like state that seems far from what would be in a utopic setting. This punishment also calls into question the morality of this system and where it falls on the spectrum of being autonomous versus having more laws and governance. Of course, both of these versus are from the “Plotting Utopia” chart—I find myself going back to this with Minority Report as I find it hard to place in the quadrants. While the government is very adamant about preventing/catching murder, they don’t seem to care much about other crimes being committed. So, there could be a fair amount of autonomy in the society, considering other laws aren’t focused on in the movie, but it could just be that the government is just overlooking crimes that don’t involve homicide… And then, again, with the happiness of the individual versus of the community—where does Minority Report’s D.C. society fall of this scale? I want to say somewhere in the middle since the community is being protected at the cost of some individuals (but there’s still debate in my head over that as well). Basically, this movie poses some strong moral questions and has some serious punishment laws... Where would you place it in the plot?

What is life?

Within this reading, there are different ideas of what constitutes being alive. The bill its self says that a child can be "retroactively" aborted "on the condition that the child's life doesn't 'technically' end". This to me seems like a contradiction within itself. By definition, the word abort means to come to a premature end so if the life does not "technically end" how can it be qualified as aborted?

The biggest contrast seems to fall between kids who are able to get unwound and adults who are able to make that decision. When Risa is confronted about being unwound the adults identify it as change and she rebuts saying that death is more than change. In response, the social worker says, "'Change...that's all. The way ice becomes water, the way water becomes clouds. You will live, Risa. Only in a different form'" (24).

I think that many of us would agree that people are inherently different than water that simply slips into different forms under different circumstances. How could you best rebut this last quote?

Ethically Right???

I didn’t finish the movie, but I got pretty far into it. I guess my question is just about ethics. I really have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of arresting people and basically trapping them forever before they’ve ever done anything wrong. I feel like there should be some type of remediation or like help given to them. I can understand and agree with stopping the crimes before they happen, but how the person is treated and dealt with afterwards seems a bit extreme. 

Criminal Justice

With the "evidence" used to make precrime arrests, it can be assumed that the need for a trial is removed because there doesn't seem to be a question of innocence or any known reasonable doubt. However, the criminal justice system in this movie seems to leave out key concepts from our current systems such as sentencing or rehabilitation. Not only were people arrested for crimes they could/would have committed but it seemed as though they were declared guilty for the rest of their lives. This is a factor of injustice that I overlooked during my first viewing of the film but I believe this is an additional problematic trait of the precrime system amongst the obvious others.

Punishment in Utopia

With the use of “halos” as the ultimate ‘demise’ for a citizen in Minority Report, I was wondering what parallel ways we can think of how a citizen of a utopia is ‘taken care of’ in our other readings. In Herlandthe citizens are not given the right to have children, and the men are educated and held captive. In Caves of Steelthere is the threat of declassification. In Unwindthere is a chance that our characters will be ‘unwound’ (more on that next class). Is ‘haloing’ a depraved form of punishment or a light one? Do the forms of punishment in a utopia show that it is truly enlightened?

I Liked Civil War 2 Better

Around the time that the movie “Captain America: Civil War” came out, Marvel comics started an event called “Civil War 2” in a shameless cash grab worthy of the comics industry. The plot of the event is basically a rip off of “Minority Report”: a new super hero emerges who has the ability to see into the future, and the super hero community uses his powers to try and stop crimes before they happen. That being said, I actually like the way “Civil War 2” works better than the way “Minority Report” works. Part of this is, of course, because I like super heroes more than I like Tom Cruise. However, there are also other reasons behind my preference. One is the level of moral ambiguity in “Civil War 2”. In the comic, Captain Marvel, who wants to prevent crimes, and Iron Man, who wants to avoid using the predictions due to both practical and moral complexities, are portrayed for the most part without much bias. Both of them have personal reasons for taking their stance on the matter, and both of them do good and bad things in the defense of their side of the conflict. The other main aspect of “Civil War 2” that I prefer is the twist: at some point it turns out that the predictions of the future are not based on actual precognition, but on the subconscious perceptions that people have about the future. Not only is this an interesting aspect of the plot, but I also feel like it provides a nice level of complexity to the whole situation.

Technology as a vehicle

Minority Report is science fiction in the truest sense, using advanced or impossible technology to explore a question; the difference between intent and action. It also shows the problems inherent to absolute belief in a supposedly infallible system. Are there any other examples, from our readings or the real world, which support the argument made by the movie/ short story?

GATTACA becomes real?!

Even though our discussion on GATTACA has ended, I wanted to share something that I came across a few days ago. On Instagram, an advertisement was shown to me that claimed that, if you had received DNA data from 23andMe, AncestryDNA, or MyHeritage, you could upload it and receive an additional analysis that would show what traits you have based on your DNA.

This just makes me think that, if this information is so easily accessible on the internet to just about anyone, the idea of analyzing what traits people will have before they are born and genetically engineering them to only have specific traits may not be all that far off. Especially since that situation is something of an ethical debate, normalizing it in such a way that it's advertised on things like Instagram might make people much more accepting of it.

Here is a link to the website: https://genomelink.io/

The Future and Absolutes

Okay, my brain isn't sciency all too often or all too well. And the future is like, impossible to think about once I scale it to a certain point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

The likely extinction date for humankind? How about the heat death of all stars? This is one of my favorite articles on Wikipedia. One of the reasons for that is that it could all be completely wrong (probably not, but possible). Not because it's Wikipedia, but because it's impossible to predict the future "with absolute certainty." So, I don't trust anything on this article "with absolutely certainty."

Back to The Minority Report. If it's impossible to think of the universe with any kind of certainty, how could we ever predict our own humanity with absolute certainty? Precogs are admittedly flawed!
Is it worth it to be wrong some of the time to take precautions all of the time? People are wrongfully sentenced today, even without a Precog system, and it's horrific.

What are the consequences of human error in prediction? Even if the state possesses the ability to predict crimes better than the layperson (which in itself is arguable), is it a valid system of prosecution if they can never predict anything with certainty?

Minority Report

I think that what made this movie interesting was the concept of a minority report which is a vision that shows an alternative fate. I think that what made this movie so bad was the lack of focus on this concept. The minority report was used as a convenient way for the not-so-bad-guy to get killed and for Tom Cruise's character to solve a murder that he didn't know he was solving. Having the director take advantage of the minority report being redacted to get away with murder is a very genius and convoluted idea. I think that discovering that there are alternative fates in Minority Report's utopia setting would be extremely disastrous to society and their beliefs. But is that explored, kind of but not really.