From Adrian Chen’s smart Gawker interview with technology skeptic supreme Evgeny Morozov, a passage about why “solving” crime might not be such a good idea, though you may disagree if you’ve recently been mugged:

“You can see such solutionist logic that presumes the existence of problems based solely on the availability of nice and quick digital solutions in many walks of life: We have the tools to make government officials more honest and consistent, ergo hypocrisy and inconsistency are problems worth solving. Take crime. We have the means to predict crime—with ‘big data’ and smart algorithms—and prevent it from happening, ergo eliminating crime is a problem worth solving.

But is eliminating crime really a project worth pursuing? Don’t we need to be able to break laws in order to revise them? Once crimes are committed, cases reach the courts, generate debate in the media, and so forth—the very fact that crimes are allowed to happen allows us to revise the norms in question. So the inefficiency of the system—the fact that the crime rate is not zero—-is what saves us from the tyranny of conservatism and complacency that might be the outcome if we delegate crime prevention to algorithms and databases..”