Speaking of Minority Report, Hitachi says it’s created a system that crunches disparate data (tweets, weather patterns, etc.) and predicts where and when future crimes will occur. Of course, right now it will do so on a macro level as traditional crime-prediction models do, not trying to pinpoint particular people, but as these kinds of tools grow more sophisticated and proliferate, it seems likely they’ll try to operate more and more on a micro one. That could be all kinds of trouble. On the surface, it would be less invasive than stop-and-frisk, but systems, like people, contain all sorts of biases and assumptions.
From Sean Captain at Fast Company:
No one has found a trio of psychic mutant “precogs” who can unanimously foresee future crimes, but Hitachi today introduced a system that promises to predict where and when crime is likely to occur by ingesting a panoply of data, from historical crime statistics to public transit maps, from weather reports to social media chatter. Hitachi says that “about half a dozen” U.S. cities will join a proof of concept test of the technology beginning in October, and though Hitachi hasn’t yet named them, Washington, D.C. could well be on the list. It’s one of several dozen cities in the U.S. and Caribbean countries where the company already provides video surveillance and sensor systems to police departments with its Hitachi Visualization Suite. Hitachi execs provided several examples—even screenshots of the software—featuring D.C. in my conversations with them.
“We don’t have any precogs as part of our system,” says Darrin Lipscomb, cofounder of companies Avrio and Pantascene, which developed crime-monitoring tech that Hitachi later acquired. “If we determined that the precogs were actually somewhat accurate, we could certainly use their predictions to feed into our model,” he says with perfect deadpan. What the new technology, called Hitachi Visualization Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA), does have is the ability to ingest streams of sensor and Internet data from a wide variety of sources.•