You are on your way home from work, it’s fairly early in the evening and it’s unusually quiet. As your fingers barely touch the doorknob, a team of cops bombard you. Naturally, you’re horrified of what is going on. You hear a voice, “You are under arrest for the murder of Evan McDonnell.” At this point, what you are thinking can range from “I’ve been caught, and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that meddling pre-crime technology.” Or “What is going on? I never wanted to murder anyone.” Either way, you’ve been accused of this crime that you are supposedly going to commit, and you are going to be “Haloed” without trial. This particular incident is an example of a pre-crime arrest similar to those in Minority Report. The movie portrays a world in the future in which the technology of “pre-crime” is created. As a citizen, you are captivated by the flashy advertisements and repetitive claims that this technology has reduced the crime rate to zero. While all this is true, the technology relies on the fact that there is a destiny. Destiny is the belief that the future is all laid out for us, and it is our job as humans to simply follow this path. This concept is unreliable and unrealistic. The pre-crime technology, though useful without a doubt, has many flaws. It is possible to hack and manipulate the technology and it has ethical holes in its seams.
As stated before, the technology relies on the concept of fate and destiny: the notion that there is a set path for human beings. If someone is going to kill someone, it is most definitely going to happen and that person must be arrested for it. Yet a fatal flaw in the technology exists, and it lies right within the title of the movie, the Minority Report. The minority report is when “one of the precogs see a different possible future from that seen by the other two”. The very existence of the minority report is proof that the future is not predetermined but only influenced. If there is no such thing as fate, and the future is either unreliable or cannot be determined, how can arresting this person be ethically correct?
According to the theory of “soft determinism”, there are multiple possible futures, and each person has “multiple actions of which he [or she] can perform”. For example, if you (yes, you), and I were in a room together with a gun and I absolutely hated your guts, I could easily in my head want to kill you. I can pick up that gun, and you’d think I was going to kill you, yet there are multiple possibilities. I could either shoot you, shoot myself, put the gun down, shoot near you, shoot a hole in the wall, the possibilities are endless. How is that any different from the people who were going to commit the murders in Minority Report? Of course, the technology has some truth, but what if, just as they were going to murder their victim, they had a change of heart and miraculously decided to let the poor woman go. It’s difficult to determine what is going to happen in the future when there are endless possibilities.
Today, humanity is so reliant on technological advances. Shows such as C.S.I. promote this technology, and its viewers become fascinated by these machines, gadgets and techniques that are used. Of course anyone would be accepting to a new technology that promises that any murder and crime can be determined before it even happens, especially in a city in which the crime and murder rate is through the roof, such as Washington D.C., the city in which Minority Report takes place. Humanity’s faith in technology should not be as strong as it is. Take a look at the technology developed in the movie, you are identified through your eyes wherever you go. Every move you make and your location is recorded, and everyone in the movie seems to be fine with this, casually walking onto the train and looking up to get his or her eyes scanned. They are also so trusting to this technology that they even let it intrude into their homes. In the shot sequence in which Tom Cruise is resting immediately after getting his eyes changed, dozens of spider-like machines crawl into each apartment of an apartment building, literally climbing onto the people and holding their eyes open. You can see that this does not faze the people, indicating that they are comfortable with these little creature-like machines invading their homes. Yet it is not unlike the privacy-invading technology we have today such as surveillance cameras and wiretapping on our phones. With the desensitizing of our lack of privacy and the faith humans have in technology; it is understandable why those in Minority Report credulously accept precrime technology.
