A Minority Report on Artificial Intelligence – NewCo Shift

Want to feel old? Steven Spielbergs Minority Report was released fifteen years ago.

It casts a long shadow. For a decade after the films release, it was referenced at least once at every conference relating to human-computer interaction. Unsurprisingly, most of the focus has been on the technology in the film. The hardware and interfaces in Minority Report came out of a think tank assembled in pre-production. It provided plenty of fodder for technologists to mock and praise in subsequent years: gestural interfaces, autonomous cars, miniature drones, airpods, ubiquitous advertising and surveillance.

At the time of the films release, a lot of the discussion centered on picking apart the plot. The discussions had the same tone of time-travel paradoxes, the kind thrown up by films like Looper and Interstellar. But Minority Report isnt a film about time travel, its a film about prediction.

Or rather, the plot is about prediction. The filmlike so many great works of cinemais about seeing. Its packed with images of eyes, visions, fragments, and reflections.

The theme of prediction was rarely referenced by technologists in the subsequent years. After all, that aspect of the storyas opposed to the gadgets, gizmos, and interfaceswas one rooted in a fantastical conceit; the idea of people with precognitive abilities.

But if you replace that human element with machines, the central conceit starts to look all too plausible. Its suggested right there in the film:

To which the response is:

Suppose that Agatha, Arthur, and Dashiell werent people in a floatation tank, but banks of servers packed with neural nets: the kinds of machines that are already making predictions on trading stocks and shares, traffic flows, mortgage applicationsand, yes, crime.

Rewatching Minority Report now, it holds up very well indeed. Apart from the misstep of the final ten minutes, its a fast-paced twisty noir thriller. For all the attention to detail in its world-building and technology, the idea that may yet prove to be most prescient is the concept of Precrime, introduced in the original Philip K. Dick short story, The Minority Report.

Minority Report works today as a commentary on Artificial Intelligencewhich is ironic given that Spielberg directed a film one year earlier ostensibly about A.I.. In truth, that film has little to say about technologybut much to say about humanity.

Like Minority Report, A.I. was very loosely based on an existing short story: Super-Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss. Its a perfectly-crafted short story that is deeply, almost unbearably, sad.

When I had the great privilege of interviewing Brian Aldiss, I tried to convey how much the story affected me.

At the time of its release, the general consensus was that A.I. was a mess. Its true. The film is a mess, but I think that, like Minority Report, its worth revisiting.

Watching now, A.I. feels like a horror film to me. The horror comes notas we first suspectfrom the artificial intelligence. The horror comes from the humans. I dont mean the cruelty of the flesh fairs. Im talking about the cruelty of Monica, who activates Davids unconditional love only to reject it (watching now, both scenesthe activation and the rejectionare equally horrific). Then theres the cruelty of the people of who created an artificial person capable of deep, never-ending love, without considering the implications.

There is no robot uprising in the film. The machines want only to fulfil their purpose. But by the end of the film, the human race is gone and the descendants of the machines remain. Based on the conduct of humanity that were shown, its hard to mourn our species extinction. For a film that was panned for being overly sentimental, it is a thoroughly bleak assessment of what makes us human.

The question of what makes us human underpins A.I., Minority Report, and the short stories that spawned them. With distance, it gets easier to brush aside the technological trappings and see the bigger questions beneath. As Al Robertson writes, its about leaving the future behind:

This was originally posted on my own site.

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A Minority Report on Artificial Intelligence - NewCo Shift