In the 2002 movie Minority Report (based on a short story by Philip K Dick), director Steven Spielberg imagined a future in which three psychics can “see” murders before they happen. Their clairvoyance allows Tom Cruise and his “Precrime” police force to avert nearly all potential homicides.
Twenty years on, in the real world, scientists and law enforcement agencies are using data mining and machine learning to mimic those psychics. Such “predictive policing”, as it is called, is based on the fact that many crimes – and criminals – have detectable patterns.
