From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed Jun 26 2002 - 19:32:56 MDT
Hal Finney wrote:
> For me, the big problem with the plot in terms of believability was the
> existence of the precogs. Not only are their psychic powers implausible,
> but they inherently involve paradoxes when people take actions based on
> the precogs' glimpses of the future (arresting murderers so that predicted
> murders don't happen, for example). However you wouldn't have a movie
> without them, so we have to suspend disbelief in this one plot element.
> And after all, every time-travel movie should have a good hard paradox
> at its core!
I haven't seen the movie yet, but from what I've heard, the point of
this is that it *isn't* actual time travel or precog. People claim it's
predictive, and hopefully there has been at least some testing to
verify the claims...but at it's heart, it's just saying "person X will
do act Y at time Z". Whether that's true or not, or has any basis in
reality...well, part of the plot of the movie is when such a trusted
system starts abusing the trust people place in it.
But time travel, it ain't. The precogs could as easily (or perhaps even
better) be a simple expert system with Big Brother level monitoring of
society that uses all the data it has to predict crimes. Except for the
sheer volume of data and intrusive monitoring required, such a system
could conceivably be built today (at enormous expense for hardware, and
probably genetic algorithms for software trained for at least a year).
Using precogs was, perhaps, just an attempt to confuse the issue - to
latch on to what has entered the common memeset as "predictive without
fail (even if it is just fantasy)" then show it failing.
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