Minority Report
Written by Philip K. Dick
www.ink2quill.com

“Minority Report” is a scifi novella written by the American scifi great Philip K. Dick. It was published in 1956 and was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 2002. It remains one of the most well known stories dealing with the use of predictive technologies to fight crime, A.I. and an individual’s free will in such societies. Among his achievements, Philip K. Dick won the Hugo Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award and published 44 novels and 121 short stories. Several of his works were adapted into film.

Minority Report IMDb webpage

“Minority Report” is the story of founder of the Precrime Division and Head Police Commissioner John Allison Anderton at what you could call the twilight of his career. Now, I say twilight because I feel that powerful enough forces want him gone or to be more precise replaced. Add to this that he is in the process of showing his future second in command Ed Witwer around the program. The Precrime Division is based on the idea of preventing crime before it happens and to do so they use the help of three psychics called ‘precogs’. They boast having only one murder committed in years to which the counter argument is that the prisons are full of people who have committed no crimes. The idea of precrime is a very controversial topic.

Anderton’s life is turned upside down and he becomes a fugitive when the precogs name him as a future murder. The precogs predict that he is going to kill a man he has never met. All this makes no sense to Anderton and at first he suspects, just like us the reader, that he is being set up, that someone has tampered with the precogs or their files. We later learn the existence of a ‘minority report’. That is to say when only 2 of the 3 precogs agree the third precog generates a minority report based on their vision of the future. Anderton’s case has a minority report and so he goes to seek it out as well as find out what is really going on. But it is safe to say that things don’t look good for Anderton. While reading the story you wonder just how he will extricate himself from this dilemma. Being accused of a future murder by the most cutting edge technology of the day is damning. Stick a fork in him because he looks done, as the expression goes.

One of the elements that make this such a great story is how unjudging the author and protagonist is of the precrime technology are. As a matter of fact, the protagonist agrees with the idea of precrime, even though, truth be told, it’s basically a thought crime system where people face the full weight of the justice system without having committed a crime. Any crimes perpetrated were only done so in the minds of the offenders. There are huge ethical issues with this technology no matter how you slice it.

Furthermore, this technology has some serious problems in the best case of scenarios. Is it safe and just to rob a person of their life and put them in so horrible a state as the precogs are living in? The precogs are described as having stunted growth to the point of looking much younger than their actual age. And by looking younger I do not mean in a youthful sense of the word. I mean it in a stunted development sense of the word. Is it just for a society to condemn people to such a horrible existence for the supposed safety of the many? That is another serious ethical issue.

Another issue with the idea of precrime is who or what group of people will control it? The story is basically a power struggle for precrime. Anderton and Witwer and General Kaplan are locked in a battle of wills for control of the Precrime Division. And those are just the players we know about that want to control Precrime. In the real world it is not so strange to think that power struggles of all kinds would develop behind the scenes for that kind of technology, should it exist in the real world. That leads into the technology’s use and eventual misuse at the hands of whomever had it. No checks and balances could contain that problem just think of the financial industry and all the fraud that has left the Western World in the current financial mess it’s in now. Now amplify the problems of the financial industry to the Nth factorial with the frauds and misuses of such technology.

Last but not least are the flaws in the system. How would you deal with the flaws in the system? All the errors that are committed. It looks like the precogs are said to be never wrong but they do disagree. Hence the creation of minority reports. Anderton effectively outsmarts the precrime system in the story. That’s an element that makes this story so brilliant. How did he do it? Well, he kept Precrime from falling in the hands of General Kaplan while not compromising the correctness of the precogs’ forecasts. Think of all the other ways it can be done. So the Precrime System is not infallible and it is not immune to manipulations. That is a very big deal.

This story is just brilliant and fun to read. It is not pretentious like so many stories of this theme. The protagonist is down to Earth and sensible and above all the ending is not predictable or trite. So enjoy.

Written by John Ink2Quill

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