In The Minority Report Philip K. Dick envisioned a future in which humanity has lost its capacity of free will and personal agency. Precog technology predicts future crimes and criminals are then jailed based on these reports. The idea of being convicted for a crime that one has not committed yet is terrifying, but the movie’s futuristic look and feel doesn’t fail to remind us that we’re still talking sci-fi here… but are we actually?
Steven Spielberg and his team did an amazing job. The movie and their visions of future technology simply look great. Let’s take a closer look at the one thing that everyone remembers after watching the movie:
Searching for “Minority Report” on Google Images leads to a flood of Tom Cruise swiping with data gloves (speaking of gloves… I’ve always wondered why they decided to leave pinky and ring finger “naked”. Any benefits you can think of?). It simply shows how much this piece of sci-fi tech was appreciated and accepted by the audiences 16 years ago. It is even more amazing to then realise that today’s technology has already surpassed Spielberg’s vision (no gloves!).
Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, haptic interfaces, and even “nerdier” technology (e.g., full-body haptic suits) are nowadays not only available for the adventurous (and financially satiated) technophile, but have already breached the mainstream of consumer society.
I think it’s worth to take a minute (or maybe a few seconds…) and let it sink. Sci-fi technology depicted in a 2002 Hollywood blockbuster is on the best way to becoming a fancy tech gadget. Interestingly it’s not only Human-Computer-Interfaces (HCI) that Minority Report predicted but also self-driving cars, personalised advertisements, and general purpose augmented reality [1].
What has been sci-fi once, has become an everyday (science) fact of our world. While the ethical and legal implications of having gesture-based HCIs might not be groundbreaking, we could instead ask ourselves how much sci-fi is still left in the terrifying idea of a Precog crime technology.
I am so far not aware of any efforts to create human mutants capable of foreseeing the close future (I am not happy to be corrected on this) but it is not hard to think of contemporary technology that has the potential to affect our understanding of free will, personal agency, and moral/legal responsibility. As this blog post is already longer than I had planned, I will simply go ahead and list a few recent developments. Can you think of other problematic technologies that might have been part of a dystopian sci-fi novel written a few decades ago?
- Facebook’s social classification patent
Facebook filed a patent for an algorithm (see cover photo) that is supposed to classify users social class, which they lovingly call “Socioeconomic Group Classification Based on User Features” [2]. Making user data available (selling) to third parties (authorities) suddenly becomes a lot creepier and worrisome… - Amazon’s no-checkout shop in Seattle
I will admit that I was initially very excited about the news of a grocery shop that requires no check-out because it simply sounded very convenient [3]. But unsurprisingly the way to provide this kind of service, is to monitor the **** out of everything in the shop. Amazon records, tracks, observes, and analyses everything that happens in their shop, potentially linking your Amazon account to your biometric profile, the way you walk, products that attracted your attention, your sense of fashion (or non-sense of fashion…) and much more. - and now take technology and give it to someone with power…
… as it is happening in China in terms of facial recognition technology. Apart from the fact that effective, wide-spread, and ubiquitous monitoring of citizens is a frightening tool of oppression, it is not hard to anticipate more problematic applications of such a framework. E.g., anonymous sources reported that facial recognition is already being used to monitor minorities in China [4]. Technology combined with a vast amount of raw data, the computational infrastructure required to run algorithms on a big scale, and the willingness to use it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euJdKsOYnXk
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INYwNy_j12Q
[4] https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/18/china-facial-recognition-uyghurs-xinjiang/
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