Debate Night: Crime and Free Will

Can crime be predicted by algorithms? And if so, should we use them to prevent crimes from happening?

This question has fueled many dystopian works of fiction, such as Minority Report, which imagines a technology capable of predicting crimes in precise detail and raises fundamental questions about free will and individual responsibility. Person of Interest explores a more realistic scenario, where machine learning and mass surveillance are used to identify high-risk individuals through the monitoring of communications. Many episodes of Black Mirror similarly examine the consequences of predictive technologies and their impact on privacy, liberty, and social control.

A common theme emerges from these stories: such technologies are often portrayed not as tools of public safety, but as threats to freedom and democracy.

Yet the idea is not purely fictional. While no system today can predict crimes with the certainty depicted in science fiction, predictive algorithms are already being used in various aspects of law enforcement and criminal justice. COMPAS, for example, has been used in American courts to estimate the likelihood that a defendant will reoffend. Geolitica, formerly known as PredPol, uses historical crime data to forecast crime hotspots and guide police deployment. More broadly, advances in artificial intelligence, big data, and digital surveillance continue to expand our ability to identify patterns in human behavior. Some even point to the Chinese Social Credit System as an example of how large-scale data collection can be used to monitor and influence citizens.

Now that the technological capabilities have already been laid out, should we, as a society, pursue the endeavor of developing a predictive algorithm that would allow us to prevent crime? Or is there a moral imperative that prevents us from doing so?

Join us as we debate whether predictive crime technology represents the future of public safety or the first step tow