"Novel Neurotechnologies in Film—A Reading of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report"

Recently published in the current issue of Neuroethics:

Novel Neurotechnologies in Film—A Reading of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report

Timothy Krahn¹, Andrew Fenton² and Letitia Meynell³

(1)	Novel Tech Ethics, Intellectual Commons, Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University, 1234 LeMarchant Street, Halifax, NS, B3H 3P7, Canada

(2)	Novel Tech Ethics, Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University, 1234 LeMarchant Street, Halifax, NS, B3H 3P7, Canada

(3)	Department of Philosophy, Dalhousie University, McCain Building, 6135 University Avenue, Halifax, NS, B3H 4P9, Canada

Received: 10 December 2008  Accepted: 16 February 2009  Published online: 20 March 2009

Abstract  

The portrayal of novel neurotechnologies in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report serves to inoculate viewers from important moral considerations that are displaced by the film’s somewhat singular emphasis on the question of how to reintroduce freedom of choice into an otherwise technology driven world. This sets up a crisis mentality and presents a false dilemma regarding the appropriate use, and regulation, of neurotechnologies. On the one hand, it seems that centralized power is required to both control and effectively implement such technologies and, on the other hand, individual heroic resistance is required to protect citizens from the invasions of personal privacy and state control made possible through neurotechnologies. While Minority Report, as a dystopic vision of emergent neurotechnologies, engages surface ethical issues it risks cheapening them through its rather simplistic, dichotomous analysis. Most conspicuously absent from this approach is a sense of the social matrices that work to circumscribe or augment expressions of human freedom, privacy, control and power that are all implicated in our engagement with novel neurotechnologies. Were Minority Report unique in this respect it would have little interest, but we think this type of cheapening of ethical discourse about novel technologies is common. Because science fiction film informs the social imaginary in which ethical considerations and ultimately policy decisions take place, such cheapening risks subverting pervasive and tangible ethical issues by focusing on the sensationalistic and simplistic.