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.