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Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Counter-Intelligence and The Minority Report

Are we expecting the intelligence community, law enforcement, and homeland security to predict the future like the "Pre-Cogs" in "The Minority Report" predicting future-crime?

What other types of crimes would we ever expect the government to be able to foretell? Theft? Assault? I don't expect them to be able to predict any of it. So why do we expect them to be able to read the future and know when some individual is going to go radical and start killing or hurting people?



No automated system or very intelligent system will any time soon be able to predict the future for us no matter how much data it can access. If it was possible right now then people would be using it to make money in the stock market or to make some other financial gain however systems that involve humans do not always behave rationally, sometimes behave chaotically, and therefore cannot be fully predicted. And when systems do get close to being able to predict things with some coarse level of detail then often those involved learn to game that system to their own ends essentially nullifying the conclusions drawn from it.

And if we ever do get a system that can predict the future, won't any actions taken based on it change the future? And if that future is changed such that what was predicted does not come to pass then was the prediction wrong? Temporal paradoxes? What??

I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to catch terrorists and criminals, we most definitely should. However, relying on foreknowledge may not be the right answer. maybe all we can do is try to discourage those that might want to do harm by being prepared and vigilant and by fighting our adversaries ideas and beliefs with the ideas and beliefs we hold true in the free world.

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