turns out Anderton was being set up. The victim—who wasn’t Anderton’s son’s abductor—was promised a substantial payout for his family if he convinced Anderton to kill him. When Anderton refuses, the victim grabs the gun in Anderton’s hand, presses it against himself, and pulls the trigger. As predicted, Anderton is identified as the killer, and is arrested, fitted with a halo, and put away.
With Anderton’s arrest, though, a darker undercurrent of events begins to emerge around the precog program. It turns out that Lamar Burgess, the program’s creator, has a secret that Anderton was in danger of discovering—an inconvenient truth that, to Lamar, stood in the way of what he believed was a greater social good. And so, to protect himself and the program, Lamar finds a way to use the precogs to silence Anderton.
As the hidden story behind the precog program is revealed, we discover that Agatha was born to a junkie mother, and suffered from being a terminally ill addict from birth. Agatha and other addict-babies became part of an ethically dubious experimental program using advanced genetic engineering to search for a cure. In this program, it’s discovered that, in Agatha’s case, a side effect of the experiments is an uncanny ability to predict future murders. Given their serendipitous powers, Agatha and two other subjects were sedated, sequestered away, wired up, and plugged into to what was to become the precog program. But Agatha’s mother cleaned herself up and demanded her daughter back, threatening the very core of this emerging technology.
Lamar couldn’t allow Agatha’s mother to threaten his plans, so he arranged an intricate ruse to dispose of her. Knowing that if he attempted to murder her, the precogs would predict it, Lamar paid a contract killer to murder Agatha’s mother. As anticipated, this was predicted and prevented by Precrime. But as soon as the killer-to-be had been hauled off, Lamar re-enacted the planned murder, this time succeeding.
Because Lamar’s act was so close to the attempted murder, images of his actions from the precogs were assumed to be part of the thwarted killing. And because Agatha’s precognition wasn’t quite in step with the two other precogs, it was treated as a minority report. In this way, using the system he’d created to bring an end to murder, Lamar pulled off the perfect murder—or so he thought. But as Anderton got closer to realizing that Lamar had staged Agatha’s mother’s murder, Lamar realized that, in order to protect Precrime, he also needed to be eliminated. And he would have succeeded, had Anderton’s estranged partner not put two and two together, and freed Anderton from his halo-induced purgatory.
Things come to a head in the movie as Anderton publicly broadcasts Agatha’s minority report of Lamar killing her mother. In doing so, he presents Lamar with a seemingly-impossible choice: kill Anderton (as the precogs are predicting) and validate the program, but be put away for life in the process; or don’t kill him, and in doing so, demonstrate a fatal flaw in the program that will result in it being terminated.
In the end, Burgess opts for a third option and kills himself. In doing so, he saves Anderton, but still reveals a flaw in the system that had predicted Anderton’s murder at his hand. As a result, Precrime is dismantled, and the precogs are allowed to live as full a life as is possible.
Minority Report is a fast-paced, crowd-pleasing, action sci-fi thriller of the caliber you’d expect from its director Stephen Spielberg. But it also raises tough questions around preemptive action based on predictive criminal behavior, as well as predestination, human dignity, and the dangers of being sucked in by seemingly beneficial technologies. It presents us with a world where technology has seemingly made people’s lives safer, but at a terrible cost that isn’t immediately obvious. And it shines a searing spotlight on the question of “should we” when faced with a seductive technology that ultimately threatens to place society in moral jeopardy.
The “Science” of Predicting Bad Behavior
In March 2017, the British newspaper The Guardian ran an online story with the headline “Brain scans can spot criminals, scientists say.”33 Unlike in Minority Report, the scanning was carried out using a hefty functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, rather than genetically altered precogs. But the story seemed to suggest that scientists were getting closer to spotting criminal intent before a crime had been committed, using sophisticated real-time brain imaging.
In this case, the headline vastly overstepped the mark. The original research used fMRI to see if brain activity could be used to distinguish knowingly criminal behavior from merely reckless behavior.34 It did this by setting up a somewhat complex situation, where volunteers were asked to take a suitcase containing something valuable through a security checkpoint while undergoing a brain scan. But to make things more interesting (and scientifically useful), their actions and choices came with financial rewards and consequences.
Each participant was first given $6,000 in “play money.” They were then presented with one to five suitcases, just one of which contained the thing of value. If they decided not to carry anything through the checkpoint, they lost $1,500. If they decided to carry a suitcase, it cost them $500. And if they dithered about it, they were docked $2,500.
Having selected a suitcase, if they chose the one with the valuable stuff inside and they weren’t searched by security, they got an additional $2,500—jackpot! But if they were searched and found to be carrying, they were fined $3,500, leaving them with a mere $2,000. On the other hand, if they weren’t carrying, they suffered no penalties, whether they were searched or not.
The point of this rather elaborate setup was that there were financial gains (at least with the fake money being used) involved with the choices made, and the implication that carrying a suitcase stuffed with valuable goods was dangerous (you could be fined if discovered carrying), but financially lucrative if you got away with it.
To mix things up further, some participants only had the choice of carrying the loaded suitcase (thus possibly getting $8,000), or declining to take part in such a dodgy deal and walking away with just $2,000. The participants who took a chance here were knowingly participating in questionable behavior. For the rest, it was a lottery whether they picked the loaded suitcase or not, meaning that their actions veered toward being more reckless, and less intentional. By simultaneously studying behavior and brain activity, the researchers were able to predict what state the participants were in—whether they were intentionally setting out to engage in behavior that maybe wasn’t legitimate, or whether they were just feeling reckless.
The long and short of this was that the study suggested brain activity could be used to indicate criminal intent, and this is what threw headline writers into a clickbait frenzy. But the research was far from conclusive. In fact, the authors explicitly stated that “it would be absurd to suggest, in light of our results, that the task of assessing the mental state of a defendant could or should, even in principle, be reduced to the classification of brain data.” They also pointed out that, even if these results could be used to predict the mental state of a person while committing a crime, they’d have to be inside an fMRI scanner at the time, which would be tricky.
Despite the impracticality of using this research to assess the mental state of people during the act of committing a crime, media stories around the study tapped into a deep-seated fascination with predicting criminal tendencies or intent—much as Veris Prime’s Truth Index does. Yet this is not a new fascination, and neither is the use of science to justify its indulgence.
In the seventeenth century, a very different “science” of predicting criminal tendencies was all the rage: phrenology. Phrenology was an attempt to predict someone’s character and behavior by the shape of their skull. As understanding around how the brain works developed, the practice became increasingly discredited. Sadly, though, it laid a foundation for assumptions that traits which appear to be common to people of “poor character” are also predictive of their behavior—a classic case of correlation erroneously being confused with causation. And it foreshadowed
