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A comment on Elon Musk Had a Deal to Sell Tesla to Google in 2013. Parent comment

Re:Elon Musk Had a Deal to Sell Tesla to Google in 2013 by navait on Monday April 20, 2015 @12:44PM (#9409268)
I don't get all the hate for Minority Report. If we ever had the capabilities their society had, we could structure our justice system in a vastly different way. If we know a violent crime was going to happen weeks before it actually did, crisis units could intervene. Jails would only be needed for those who could never change. Suicides would be a thing of the past. Police officers would drop a "shoot first" policy, and end many of the abuses we have today. Everyone would be better off.

Minority report's mistake is to assume we'll use old-fashioned police with new tech. But new technology allows us to change society in unimaginable ways.

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Re:Elon Musk Had a Deal to Sell Tesla to Google in 2013 by snowwrestler on Monday April 20, 2015 @12:57PM (#9409359)
There are incredible technologies to predict crime now. The problem is that they require the government to collect huge amounts of information on people to inform the predictions.

That's a trade-off that a lot of people are uncomfortable with, because sometimes the technology gets it wrong. And innocent people end up on the no-fly list, arrested, tracked, etc. Or worse, the system confuses political activism with actual criminality, and ends up protecting the status quo instead of just enforcing the law.

I haven't seen Minority Report for a while, but I remember that being a big theme in that movie as well. Wasn't that the dilemma faced by Cruise's character? Go to jail to protect the system, or stand up and admit it is flawed.

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Re:Elon Musk Had a Deal to Sell Tesla to Google in 2013 by navait on Monday April 20, 2015 @02:08PM (#9409806)
We don't have the technology to say "X will commit Y at place Z at time T". We have the technology to say "Person X is somewhat likely to be a terrorist based on known data". That's an important distinction - they only let traditional police do their jobs in a smarter way, not end their job as we know it.
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