In 1956, Philip K. Dick coined the term "precrime" in his novella "The Minority Report" — which became a blockbuster movie in 2002— introducing the notion that, in the future, police would be able to stop crime before it happened.

Typical of Dick's vision, this involved a combination of humans with precognitive powers and technology (a computer) which interpreted what those "precogs" were predicting.

Since the turn of the century, police has used all sort of "predictive" technologies to aid them to catch potential criminals before they commit their heinous acts.

Until recently, such technologies relied mostly on statistics compiled by the police, tied to geographic "hot spots" of crime; they are good aids for police forces to know where to deploy their forces next.

But now we have much more advanced tools. On one hand, everybody has a "tracker" in their pockets — and the precision of locating a mobile phone is phenomenal.

On the other hand, we have AI — which does excellent pattern matching as well as generating possible scenarios based on existing patterns. The result is that police doesn't even need to track criminals; all they need is to let AI analyse movement patterns of millions of people and match each with the modus operandi of known criminals —

— what places they visited, where they spend their time, and so forth. Unlike the novella or the movie, we don't need to rely on paranormal powers; we just need the kind of AI we have today.

What will that mean for our societies? Will the assumption of "innocent until proven guilty" be dropped from our legal systems? Or, on a positive note, will such "precrime" technologies actually move us towards a world with much less crime? Come and discuss!

ChatGPT insights:

https://chat.openai.com/...