Are We Already Living in a "Minority Report" World?

While I will admittedly join the ranks of those impressed with the rapid speed with which law enforcement officials were able to identify and engage the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon tragedy, there is still something that bothers me about using technology to figure out who will perpetrate crimes in the future. Yet that is exactly what law enforcement officials are doing in Maryland and Pennsylvania:

"When police in Minority Report predicted who would commit crimes and stopped them before they did it, it was considered so futuristic, the film was set in 2054.

Now, however, law enforcers in two American states are using crime-prediction software to predict which freed prisoners are most likely to commit murder, and supervising them accordingly. Instead of relying on parole officers to decide how much supervision inmates will need on the outside by looking at their records, the new system uses a computer algorithm to decide for them.

The Minority Report-style software is already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict future murderers, and will be extended to Washington D.C. soon.

It has been developed by Professor Richard Berk, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who believes it will reduce the murder rate and those of other crimes."

While this in undoubtedly interesting, and while it is possible that the technology could neutralize biases and preconceived notions of those who keep track of ex-cons, and while it could possibly even cut down crime, it is also true that there is a real presumption of a lack of free will surrounding these tools. Yet another trade-off our tech-dependent society has declared itself willing to make, perhaps, but not one which should go unnoticed, at least not in my humble opinion.