The Minority Report

A 1956 novelette, first published in Fantastic Universe, in which a police division called Precrime arrests people for murders three precognitives have foreseen but nobody has yet committed. The plot turns when the division’s own head is named by the system, and on the discovery that the three forecasts do not always agree — the dissenting one is the minority report of the title.

Context: a16z open their Philip K Dick entry by saying every one of his roughly 150 novels and stories carries “at least one genuinely new idea,” and give “catching crime before it happens” as their first example — this is that story. It is also the cleanest short introduction to the recurring Dick problem of a prediction system whose outputs become the thing being predicted.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from, where six Dick works are named.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Philip K. Dick — the author.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — the other Dick work on the list that became a defining film adaptation.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.