Minority Report: Possible?

January 30, 2012

I was sitting around in the Thompson Lounge at Park University the other day with my fellow philosophy club members having an awesome philosophical discussion. I love these coffee shop get-togethers, not going to lie about that; I’m kind of a huge philosophy nerd. Actually, I’m a nerd in general as you can tell from my previous blogs. But, what else would you expect?

Anyways, we were discussing a time paradox, similar to but not exactly like the one that can be found in the movie Minority Report, which was first a book by Philip K. Dick—an author I definitely recommend.

But now back to philosophy club; say you build a machine that can detect 24 hours out that a crime is going to be committed within a 5 block radius.

So to be sure it works, you set it up, and it beeps indicating that a crime will be committed in a specified area within the 5 blocks and at a specified time within the 24 hours. You go investigate, and sure enough, a crime has occurred then and there. So, you let it do this a few times to discover the machine’s accuracy, and it becomes apparent that its accuracy is 100%.

So you get a police squad to take over the stopping of the crime. The machine beeps indicating a crime is about to occur again, and the police stop the crime. That seems reasonable enough.

But there’s one problem; either, the machine is providing false answers by telling you a crime is about to occur in the future when it doesn’t, or the machine is stopping these crimes on its own—i.e. there is no need for the police force’s involvement or to take proactive action.

For if the machine is accurate,and the crimes were being stopped, then it shouldn’t indicate a crime is about to happen. The future of the crime coming to fruition never occurs because in the distant future there is supposedly a police force stopping the crime, but this is not what your reality ever becomes. Crazy!

Now the difference between Minority Report and our thought experiment, ethics wise, is that this is not arresting those who would commit the crime but just stopping the situation. The ethical implications of the movie and novel are very fascinating, but that discussion is for another day.

So, to this conundrum, I have no answer for you. That’s the beauty and frustration of philosophy. It really is wonderful, and here are our philosophy resources:

Books

Web Resources

Do you think the machine is stopping these crimes on its own or do you think it’s providing false answers?

~Cody C.
Parkville Branch