The Minority Report

The motif of machinery and automation explores the dehumanization of society. While a major theme in the work is the question of whether individual values matter more than the “greater good” of society, Dick simultaneously questions whether society itself has become another, bigger machine. “The Minority Report” is set in a futuristic, postwar society with highly developed technology. With flying police vehicles, extensive space travel and colonization, “atronic appliances” (100), and explosive guns, machines are ubiquitous. Computers analyze the precog prophecies, organizing information on future criminal acts and stamping it onto punchcards for police inspection. However, this type of automated system results in the dehumanization of the population.

Precogs are metaphorical “cogs” in the machine and viewed as less than human. Their names, when mentioned, are always in quotes—“Jerry,” “Donna,” “Mike”—as if the very idea of their humanized, individual identity were in doubt. By likening them to machines—and therefore “less than human”—the society Dick has envisioned justifies their exploitation; if they lack individual thought and identity, they have no need for free will. Although precogs, like computers, have unique talents that other humans do not, neither machines nor precogs are considered sentient. Both are designed for a single function, and completing this function successfully is what makes both useful: Machines analyze data, and the precogs literally live to serve by emitting a constant stream of prophecies that are of no benefit to themselves.

Other humans are not exempt from this automated dehumanization. Anderton comes to realize this during his ordeal as an accused murder and subsequent stint as a fugitive, but he still considers himself a unique case because of his access to insider information. Even as he questions the Precrime system and his own human rights within it, he never questions the idea that others might have also avoided a similar fate had they seen their own prophecies. Instead, Anderton continues to support the mechanized system he created, to the point that he kills Kaplan to protect it, sacrificing his own human rights in the process and leaving Witwer with the warning that similar circumstances “might happen to [Witwer] at any time” (102). This in turn simultaneously acknowledges Witwer’s unique identity as police commissioner and reduces him to a cog in the Precrime machine.

The general public suffers a similar fate, variously appearing as convicted criminals classified through the Precrime system, a faceless audience “avidly interested” in following a novel murder, or simply as a hotel clerk who “[is] not interested” in anything “[b]eyond collecting the money due him” (84). During Kaplan’s attempted coup and army rally, the audience are “informants making observations” (97), and even the generals, once divided by opposing wartime loyalties, have merged, their “fine distinctions [...] faded over the years” (102). With the advent of automation, human individuality has faded within the homogenizing system as people emulate the machinery they created rather than stand apart from it.