In recent decades, intrusive or authoritarian government policies have invariably been described as ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Kafkaesque’. But these days, you will increasingly find more allusions to another past master of dystopian fiction: Philip K Dick.
A prime example of this arrived last week, following reports that the British state is now running a ‘murder prediction’ programme. Apparently, the authorities believe they can use the personal data of known offenders to ‘predict’ who is at risk of committing future murders. ‘Government creating Minority Report-style “murder-prediction tool” that uses personal data to identify most likely killers’, ran a Daily Mail headline. This was a reference to the 2002 film based on Dick’s 1956 novella, The Minority Report, in which a ‘precrime’ police unit, with the aid of psychic individuals called ‘pre-cogs’, hunts down those who – it is foreseen – will commit a crime.
