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The Seductive Slippery Slope of using Science to Predict “Bad” Behavior

17 min readSep 26, 2020

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From Minority Report (2002). Twentieth Century Fox

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…

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EDGE OF INNOVATION
EDGE OF INNOVATION

Published in EDGE OF INNOVATION

Exploring the cutting edge of emerging technologies and responsible innovation

Andrew Maynard
Andrew Maynard

Written by Andrew Maynard

Scientist, author, & Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions at Arizona State University