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The Seductive Slippery Slope of using Science to Predict “Bad” Behavior
Incredibly, there are still researchers who believe we can use advanced technologies to predict whether someone is good or bad. They are wrong
In 2018, I wrote extensively about using technology to predict behavior — especially criminal intent and a propensity toward “bad” behavior — in the book Films from the Future .
Given renewed interest in this area, I thought it worth posting a few relevant excerpts from the book here. These are from chapter four, which was inspired by the movie Minority Report. While this film uses a fantastical plot device (“precogs” able to predict future murders) it nevertheless provides a rich backdrop against which to explore the dangers of assuming that technology can be used to sift out “good” people from “bad.”
The “Science” of Predicting Bad Behavior
In March 2017, the British newspaper The Guardian ran an online story with the headline “Brain scans can spot criminals, scientists say.” Unlike in Minority Report, the scanning was carried out using a hefty functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, rather than genetically altered precogs. But the story seemed to suggest that scientists…