of those who develop them. Because of this, there’s a very real possibility that an artificial judge and jury that relies only on what you look like will reflect the prejudices of its human instructors.
This research is also disturbing because it takes us out of the realm of people interpreting data that may or may not be linked to behavioral tendencies, and into the world of big data and autonomous machines. Here, we begin to enter a space where we have not only trained computers to do our thinking for us, but we no longer know how they’re thinking. In a worrying twist of irony, we are using our increasing understanding of how the human brain works to develop and train artificial brains that we are increasingly ignorant of the inner workings of.
In other words, if we’re not careful, in our rush to predict and preempt undesirable human behavior, we may end up creating machines that exhibit equally undesirable behavior, precisely because they are unpredictable.
Big Brother, Meet Big Data
Despite being set in a technologically advanced future, one of the more intriguing aspects of Minority Report is that it falls back on human intuition when interpreting the precog data feed. In the opening sequences, Chief Anderton performs an impromptu “ballet” of preemptive deduction, as he turns up the music and weaves the disjointed images being fed through from the three precogs into a coherent narrative. This is a world where, perhaps ironically, given the assumption that human behavior is predictable, intuition and creativity still have an edge over machines.
Anderton’s professional skills tap into a deep belief that there’s more to the human mind than its simply being the biological equivalent of a digital computer—even a super-powerful one. As the movie opens, Anderton is responsible for fitting together a puzzle of fragmented information. And, as he aligns the pieces and fills the gaps, he draws connections between snippets of information that seem irrelevant or disjointed to the untrained eye, so much so that the skill he demonstrates lies in the sum total of his experiences as a living human being. This is adeptly illustrated as Anderton pins down the location of an impending murder by recognizing inconsistencies in two images that, he deduces, could only be due to a child riding an old-fashioned merry-go-round.
This small intuitive leap is deeply comforting to us as viewers. It confirms to that there’s something uniquely special about people, and it suggests that we are more than the sum of the chemicals, cells, and organs we’re made of. It also affirms a belief that we cannot simply be defined by what we look like, or by the electrical and chemical processes going on inside our head.
But are we right in this belief that we are more than the sum of our parts? What if we could be reduced to massive amounts of data that not only determine who we are, but how we will act and react in any given situation?
Questions like this would have been hypothetical, bordering the fantastical, not so long ago. Certainly, as a species, we’ve toyed with the idea for centuries that people are simply complex yet ultimately predictable biological machines (chaos theory not withstanding). But it’s only recently that we’ve had the computing power to start capturing every minutia of ourselves and the world around us and utilizing it in what’s increasingly called “big data.”
“Big data”—which when all’s said and done is just a fancy way of saying massive amounts of information that we can do stuff with—has its roots in human genome sequencing. Our genetic code has three billion discrete pieces of information, or base pairs, that help define us biologically. Compared to the storage capacity of early computers, this is a stupendously large amount of information, far more than could easily be handled by the computing systems of the 1970s and 1980s, or even the 1990s, when the initiative to decode the complete human genome really took off. But, as we began to understand the power of digital computing, scientists started to speculate that, if we could decode the human genome and store it in computer databases, we would have the key to the code of life.
With hindsight, they were wrong. As it turns out, decoding the human genome is just one small step toward understanding how we work. But this vision of identifying and cataloguing every piece of our genome caught hold, and in the late 1990s it led to one of the biggest sets of data ever created. It also spawned a whole new area of technology involving how we collect, store, analyze, and use massive amounts of data, and this is what is now known colloquially as Big Data.
As we’ve since discovered, the ability to store three billion base pairs of genetic code in computer databases barely puts us in the foothills of understanding human biology. The more we find out, the more complex we discover life is. But the idea that the natural world can be broken down into its constituent parts, uploaded into cyberspace, and played around with there remains a powerful one. And there’s still a belief held by some that, if we have a big enough computer memory and a powerful enough processor, we could in principle encode every aspect of the physical and biological world and reproduce it virtually.
This is the idea behind movies like The Matrix (which sadly didn’t make the cut for this book) where most people are unwittingly playing out their lives inside a computer simulation. It also underpins speculations that arise every now and again that we are all, in fact, living inside a computer simulation, but just don’t know it. There are even researchers working on the probability that this is indeed the case.42
This is an extreme scenario that comes out of our growing ability to collect, process, and manipulate unimaginable amounts of data. It’s also one that has some serious flaws, as our technology is rarely as powerful as our imaginations would like it to be. Yet the data revolution we’re currently living through is still poised to impact our lives in quite profound ways, including our privacy.
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