I know what you are going to do next summer

Tom Cruise, who acted in ‘Minority Report’, and (inset) Steven Speilberg who directed it.

The year is 2054. In Washington, there’s a police department, ‘Precrime’ which catches criminals before they have committed a crime, thanks to help from three ‘precogs’. This is the premise of the movie Minority Report, based on Philip K Dick’s novella. Tom Cruise is in it, Steven Spielberg directed it.

Ha! ha! we said. Such things can only happen in movies. It was fun, but “not in our lifetime”, we concluded. Looking back now, perhaps this is how some of the gadgets in the James Bond movies of the past — cell phones and fancy cars — must have appeared to viewers initially.

Minority Report was made in 2002, Dick’s story published in 1956 when Cold War anxieties reigned. If two of the precogs following the dots agreed on a person’s future, that was the majority report. Then the dissenting opinion of the third became a minority report, but that could be equally valid. Soon the head of ‘precrime’ is seen to commit a murder in the future; the classic duel between authoritarianism and individual liberty unfolds.

And now here we are. The UK is developing a “murder prediction” programme to identify the people most likely to become killers. According to The Guardian, researchers are using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those likely to commit serious offences. The scheme is called “sharing data to improve risk assessment”, which lacks the snappy wit of the movie title, but that’s not its biggest drawback.

There is something chilling and dystopian about Big Brother not only watching you but reading your thoughts. Sometimes even before you have them. What next? Planting thoughts in your mind?

Data from people not convicted of any offence will be used as part of the project, in case you thought this was just about criminals. Forget to wish your boss ‘good morning’ and you could be on the list if he complains to the police.

Suddenly you are on file, your personal data and health markers available at the stroke of a key. And you may be at the mercy of officials who are fanatics or mentally ill themselves. Imagine then if you don’t say the right things or worship at the right place or earn a living making fun of the rich and powerful. Remember when, a couple of years ago, a stand-up comedian was arrested for a joke he didn’t tell? He was accused of “intent” to offend. Authorities can sometimes ‘see’ the future without precogs or databases.

Minority Report set off a philosophical discussion for a while. The idea that all events are determined by past events is a blow against free will which then leads to the question, how much moral responsibility does a person own for his actions?

The UK’s “murder prediction programme” acts like a psychoanalyst in reverse, joining non-existent dots extended to the future rather than existing dots that go into past. It is the dream of dictators around the world.