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In June 2002, Steven Spielberg premiered a new movie he had directed, Minority Report, based on a famous 1956 short story by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Set in 2054 in a crime-free Washington, DC, the film stars Tom Cruise, who plays the head of Precrime, an elite police unit that arrests killers before they commit their crimes. The team has the authority to make its arrests based on the visions of three clairvoyant individuals who can see into the future. But soon Cruise is evading his own unit—in a city where everyone and everything is tracked—when the psychics predict he will commit a murder of his own.
More than fifteen years later, this approach to law enforcement happily seems far-fetched. But today, one aspect of Minority Report seems to be on track to arrive much earlier than 2054. As Cruise is on the run, he walks into the Gap. The retailer has technology that recognizes each entering customer and immediately starts displaying on a kiosk the images of clothes it believes the customer will like. Some people might find the offers attractive. Others might find them annoying or even creepy. In short, entering a store becomes a bit like we sometimes feel after browsing the web and then turning to our social media feed only to find new ads promoting what we just viewed.
In Minority Report, Spielberg asked theatregoers to think about how technology could be both used and abused—to eliminate crimes before they could be committed but also to abuse people’s rights when things go wrong. The technology that recognizes Cruise in the Gap store is informed by a chip embedded inside him. But the real-world technology advances of the first two decades of the twenty-first century have outpaced even Spielberg’s imagination, as today no such chip is needed. Facial-recognition technology, utilizing AIbased computer vision with cameras and data in the cloud, can identify the faces of customers as they walk into a store based on their visit last week—or an hour ago. It is creating one of the first opportunities for the tech sector and governments to address ethical and human rights issues for artificial intelligence in a focused and concrete way, by deciding how facial recognition should be regulated.
What started for most people as a simple scenario, such as cataloging and searching photos, has rapidly become much more sophisticated. Already many people have become comfortable relying on facial recognition rather than a password to unlock an iPhone or a Windows laptop. And it’s not stopping there.
Excerpted from pages 211 to 212 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne