Page 37 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Extrapolator Murders

“Every branch of science wants to have the computer do this
work. And it is spreading to big corporations and big government.
Local police departments already use this function to identify crime
zones. In many of these cases, the power of this knowledge is
simply prediction—useful for weather forecasting, as an example.
But the specificity of this knowledge can take the algorithms a step
further, enabling prediction to become control. If I knew everything
about you available from the media you use, and knew those types
of things about millions of people, I might arrive at a very high
probability of predicting what you will do tomorrow: where you will
go, what you will do with whom, and so forth. And if I can tie all
that to the profile of a criminal, I might want to start surveilling you
even closer. That would start with an officer of the law asking the
question, ‘who are the most dangerous people in my jurisdiction?’
Now you have the prerequisite to an automated targeting system,
the holy grail of the military, in the hands of every law enforcement
agency with access to the computer. It is not a great leap to letting
that system do the messy job of actually policing those suspects-
before-the-fact, giving it the power once reserved for human
officers.”
He paused, noting the degree to which his audience had begun
to look glassy-eyed.
“Okay, I’m getting to the story. Given all this power, the police
in some large city—maybe this one—have been using the
Extrapolator, made by the Opticracy Corporation. The cops
effectively sit back and wait for their screens to light up with
another place where trouble is brewing or telling them to make an
arrest of perpetrators it has identified after the fact. If it were
perfect, of course, it wouldn’t have to find criminals, because their
crimes would have been predicted and interdicted. So it comes as a
surprise when several murders are reported over a period of days,
and the expert all-seeing system hasn’t seen them coming and
warned anyone, nor has it named the perpetrators. The formerly
sharp-eyed detectives dread just such a crime wave: a serial killer on
the loose is bad publicity, for them and for the system they use.
Opticracy has no explanation, so the police start doing real work.”

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