In Minority Report (the movie based on Philip K. Dick novel) there is no crime. Thanks to a group of people with precognitive abilities, government is able to detect the crime before it actually occurs, and contain the person who is about to commit the crime. Things obviously go wrong, Tom Cruise has to run away from the entire police force chasing him, but that’s not really the point.
The point is - such system is the holy grail of surveillance. But instead of precognitive humans, we hope to create precognitive artificial intelligence (AI), that will be able to detect crime before it occurs.
Such precognition would have nothing to do with 'Minority Report's’ precogs' collective unconscious. Surveillance AI would analyse patterns of body movement, voice tonality, facial expression, group dynamics, object detection and other measurable factors to decide whether something bad is about to happen. It would be linked with national identity database, screening biometric information for any personal records that would estimate the chance of particular person committing crime. Collecting all those information, it would display risk probability and give a final decision to human operator. Or just send the police van to the site without human decision.
As you can imagine, it’s extremely complex to create such system. The reason is mainly due to complexity of any social scene out there in the world - there are too many viewing angles, lighting conditions, resolution differences, distances, and ways people interact and behave. Another problem is how to integrate all this complex information. You would need proper supercomputer and very good software, operating on a very sophisticated level of non-linear statistical integration, chaos mathematics, similar to what is used to predict weather, but on a larger scale.
Still, we are closer to this goal than 10 years ago, and UK is one of the places where intelligent AI is most likely to happen. UK has biggest CCTV network in the world. The rough estimate is 4 million CCTV cameras, but it’s likely to be more than that, and counting. While there are some older systems in place, majority of the mainstream network (e.g. London or Glasgow) has been upgraded to high-resolution, high-speed digital cameras capable of running face recognition software. London on it’s own has more CCTV cameras than the entire west coast of the US. Your live is pretty much a silent reality show in London. Our computers are also getting better very fast, and we are able to store and process increasingly more data. Most important - we are becoming increasingly more available for screening via social networks - we open ourselves online and give away all necessary information, without any government enforcing us to do that. We are connected 24 hours to a very precise tracking system - the mobile phone. Thats where the future of surveillance really exist. In you 1000 Facebook photos, your Twitts and text messages, your blogs and ‘like’ comments. Now, the only task is to really connect all those points into one integrated system, that will extract the patterns of information automatically and intelligently, and we have a Minority Report. You wrote it.
