Holding a black mirror up to artificial intelligence
Biometric Mirror is an interactive application that shows how you may be perceived by others. Its flaws teach us an important lesson about the ethics of AI, write the University of Melbourne’s Dr Niels Wouters and Professor Frank Vetere.
In 2002, the sci-fi thriller Minority Report gave us a fictionalised glimpse of life in 2054. Initially, the movie evokes a perfect utopian society where artificial intelligence (AI) is blended with surveillance technology for the wellbeing of humanity.
The AI supposedly prevents crime using the predictions from three precogs – these psychics visualise murders before they happen and police act on the information.
“The precogs are never wrong. But occasionally, they do disagree.”
So says the movie’s lead scientist and these disagreements result in minority reports; accounts of alternate futures, often where the crime doesn’t actually occur. But these reports are conveniently disposed of, and as the story unfolds, innocent lives are put at stake.
