It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen.
Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly reports since they don't definitively tell you how the company will be doing - they just tell you how it has been doing. Prediction and imagination are not flawless tools, but they are helpful to plan for the future. (Which is amusing to say in the light of the book being discussed)
If I similarly just made up a book where police surveillance was the best thing in the world would you cite that as an argument in favour?
How can you use a made up story to argue something when someone else could make up another story that disproves your point and proves theirs?
Just by chance, you can go back and find stories from the past that seem prophetic now, but not going forward.
PredPol is a precrime system written by a mathematician (an assistant professor of math and CS) which recommends where police officers ought to patrol. [2] PredPol was deployed in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, CA.
This is not fiction.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100603031047/http://www.dhs.go...
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110527/full/news.2011.323.h...
No the book and movie are fiction, I mean. You can't learn anything from them. They're made up. Inside someone's head. There's zero data points in them.
I'm sure you can learn something from studying the history of the two projects you mentioned!
But not from a story someone made up and that some people acted out on a film set. That's not data. Don't base you philosophy on something that didn't actually happen.
You have made the erroneous assumption that I cannot articulate the insights, and further the erroneous conflation between "cannot" and "will not".
Using the logic you've already employed, one could conclude that the entire anthology of philosophical texts also have zero bearing on reality because "they're all made up".
The details are total BS, but sci-fi is absolutely a good vector for allegories and societal insights.
If you're actually trying to contribute to the discussion, it follows that you would try to convey the insights you've learned from Minority Report in a way that can help others to appreciate what you think is important.
You're right -- it could very well be that you have some deep insight you gained from Minority Report, but simply refuse to say it, even as you post on this forum, and even as you demand others take the time to watch it based on nothing but that demand. I was aware of this possibility, but ignored it, because that would speak very poorly of you, to take the time to post and yet share nothing of what you learned.
What's more likely is that you have nothing to share, because you simply had the feeling of insight, but without any of the substance that would allow you to share what you've learned. The fact that you so steadfastly refuse to share means you probably never gained the insight to begin with. That's why I made the comment: to distinguish between false and real insight, you need to do a check about whether you can actually share with others what you learned without them having to set aside the three hours that you did.
That's not snark, it's good epistemic hygiene and respect for others' time in a discussion. I do hope you take the advice seriously next time.
Societal and philosophical questions don't work like that, ethics are driven by society and the view of society changes over time with actions like, as an example, eating beef on Fridays being incredibly taboo among christian societies a few hundred years ago (and to this day in some areas) to the point where taking an action like that in public would likely call into question your ability to act ethically.
Ethics is a highly subjective field - if you try and revive geocentric solar system models with a paper that essentially amounts to "I said so" you'll be dismissed since there are theories with more evidence out there. The process of allegorization though is a more subjective and iterative process where two people can honestly state very different theories and have wide support from large groups - including potentially having mutual supporters.
The allegory that comes from Sci-fi isn't a statement of fact, it's an opinion on danger and while objective evidence is always preferred it doesn't mean that subjective evidence is meaningless. The process of going back and forth forever is quite valuable, if it isn't being done with "No, you're stupids" then each participant will be further developing their theory to account for weaknesses or vagaries exposed by the other participant and that process produces a better understanding in both parties and more refined theories to be presented to spectators.
The question of whether it's morally correct to commit murder is still open - there are some really compelling arguments in favor of not murdering people and some of those even arise purely out of self-interest[1] but if I say "Bob murdered Jim" there are all sorts of qualifiers and conditions that can take that from being pretty ethically repugnant (say infanticide) to being generally seen as justified (maybe, ongoing debate yo) at least in the US (say a genuinely necessary and unavoidable act of self-defense).
The problems fantasy is really good at digging into are ethical ones and, physics based fantasy books are super boring. If your sci-fi book was about how the earth would be different if G was actually 1.367×10−10 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2 you would essentially have a book about how some mechanics of movement are affects and why planes are so expensive to fly - you could build an interesting plot, but the allegorical value would be essentially nil... well that's what I think, lesse is some sci-fi writer comes along and writes a super impactful and interesting novel about an earth that is essentially the same as ours but with slightly less than two times as much gravity.
1. Which tends to be the strongest moral guidance IMO, but I'm jaded :shrug: