Robocop and Minority Report are two films with similar premises when stripped to their barest forms – a police officer working for a privately owned corporation for the greater good eventually is turned on by the company they work for and must prove himself by taking down the owner or president of said privately owned corporation. Both films take place in a not-so-distant future: distant enough to have technology far more advanced than the norm today, yet close enough so that society is still recognizable.
The plot of Minority Report revolves around stopping criminals from committing murder before they do it, which is a cyberpunk trope known as pre-crime. While precogs don’t exist in real life, the article “AI is sending people to jail – and getting it wrong” written by Karen Hao talks about an algorithm designed to predict the likelihood that any one convict will commit a crime or reoffend, with that knowledge being used to either convict the person or decide their sentence. The problem with that algorithm, as stated in the article, is that it bases its predictions off of historical crime data, which creates patterns based off statistical correlations and not causations. This means that if a certain community historically has more crime attached to it, such as low income or minority communities, the algorithm looks to see if a person would be considered as part of that community and judge the likelihood of them breaking the law based off of that.
A similar issue arises in Minority Report when the main character, John Anderton, realizes that pre-crime isn’t a perfect system and that his convicts all have the option to change their minds before committing their crime. This puts him at a realization that he had definitely put away innocent people, which is the same as what this AI algorithm in real life is doing. In the end, it’s not so different. In Robocop, this issue is not so prevalent. There’s no predicting what people will do before they do it – instead, the titular character sees people already in the process of committing the crime and immediately puts a stop to it.
The privatized corporation in Robocop, OCP, aims to create a police state where they have total control over the city. In a way, this is similar to what the corporation in Minority Report strives for as well: the idea of pre-crime was invented by one person, the president of the company, who hid his own murder crime to prove to everyone that his idea was flawless. When the truth started to reveal itself, he aimed to get rid of the character that would be his downfall: Anderton. In Robocop, once Robocop started to become an actual threat to OCP by learning the truth of his origin, the president of OCP started giving out orders to destroy Robocop and make sure that his own secret (that he was working with the criminals of the city) wouldn’t be revealed. The two films are similar in this aspect.
As mentioned in the article AI is sending people to jail, the ultimate goal of the algorithm is to reduce prison numbers and establish a system where convicts can easily be processed through the system. Robocop aims to do the same by having the titular character be the convenient tool and Minority Report with the precogs, though both films seem to end up with more people locked up than before. In real life, with the AI relying on historical statistics more than anything, innocent people get locked up just like in the movies.
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Orejel, Keith. “What Robocop Tells Us about the Neoliberal City, Then and Now.” Tropics of Meta, 24 Mar. 2014, tropicsofmeta.com/2014/03/24/what-robocop-tells-us-about-the-neoliberal-city-then-and-now/.
Spielberg, Steven, director. Minority Report. 2003.
Verhoeven, Paul, director. Robocop. Orion, 1987.
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