nearfi.
Field notes from a little way ahead Week 45 · 2 Nov 2026 · Still early
P(n) Board › Minority Report
Prediction ledger · Film · 2002 · set in Washington, DC, 2054

Did Minority Report come true?

Minority Report is more prescient about interfaces and surveillance than about policing: gesture-driven computers and driverless taxis are already on sale, and face recognition in public is spreading, while Precrime itself was tried in a weaker form and largely abandoned. Its clearest miss is the phone, because personalised selling and live news reached us through a screen in the hand, not through walls and sheets of electronic paper.

Read the review · 8.3/10 →
Minority Report: official artwork
P(n)
44%
Claims
6
Next likely arrival
2032
How this P(n) was calculated

Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story: 5 is the core premise, 1 is background detail. Arrived scores 1, arriving 0.5, everything else 0. P(n) is the weighted points divided by the total weight.

ClaimPrediction · why this weightWeightStatusValuePoints
MR-1Police arrest and detain people for crimes that a prediction system says they will commit, before any offence has taken place.
Core premise: Precrime is the film's story.
 5DIVERGED00
MR-2Advertising screens in public places identify individual passers-by from a biometric scan and address them by name with personalised adverts.
Texture: the name-calling adverts are iconic world-building during the chase.
 2ARRIVING0.51
MR-3Commercial computers can be operated by mid-air hand gestures, so that users grab, pinch and fling windows of information without touching a screen or controller.
Texture: the gesture interface is how Anderton reviews visions; the plot doesn't depend on it.
 2ARRIVED12
MR-4People are identified automatically by biometric scanners as they move through public spaces, without stopping or showing any document.
Major: ubiquitous eye scans force Anderton's eye transplant and shape the manhunt.
 4ARRIVING0.52
MR-5Members of the public ride in cars that drive themselves through city streets with no human driver on board.
Texture: self-driving cars set the scene and stage one chase.
 2ARRIVED12
MR-6Newspapers are thin, flexible sheets of electronic paper that update their headlines and pictures live while you read them.
Background: a passing shot of a live-updating newspaper on the train.
 1DIVERGED00
Total167

P(n) = 7 ÷ 16 = 44% · unweighted average 50%

  1. MR-1

    Police arrest and detain people for crimes that a prediction system says they will commit, before any offence has taken place.

    DIVERGEDCore premiseNo arrival expected in this formConfidence: high

    Weight 5/5 · Core premise: Precrime is the film's story.

    The nearest real versions forecast places or scored individuals for police attention, rather than licensing pre-emptive arrest, and the best-known of them was dropped after its makers failed to show that it worked. An independent test of Geolitica's (formerly PredPol's) predictions in Plainfield, New Jersey, found that fewer than half of one per cent matched a reported crime. Since February 2025 the EU AI Act has prohibited predicting an individual's offending based solely on profiling. Person-level risk prediction is still being researched, for example by the UK Ministry of Justice, so the impulse survives, but detention for a crime not yet committed is not where the legal or technical trend points. 1234

  2. MR-2

    Advertising screens in public places identify individual passers-by from a biometric scan and address them by name with personalised adverts.

    ARRIVINGTextureEst. 2038 · range 2030–2060Confidence: low

    Weight 2/5 · Texture: the name-calling adverts are iconic world-building during the chase.

    Partial forms exist. Camera-equipped billboards in shopping centres and transport hubs estimate a viewer's age, gender and sometimes mood, then switch the advert, but their operators say the systems detect faces rather than recognise specific people. Identifying named individuals is technically feasible but meets privacy law and courts: São Paulo's metro operator was ordered to stop, and Canada's privacy commissioner opened an investigation in 2025. Personalisation by identity mostly arrived on phones instead, so the film's public version may never become normal; the wide range and low confidence reflect that. 567

  3. MR-3

    Commercial computers can be operated by mid-air hand gestures, so that users grab, pinch and fling windows of information without touching a screen or controller.

    ARRIVEDTextureArrived 2024Confidence: high

    Weight 2/5 · Texture: the gesture interface is how Anderton reviews visions; the plot doesn't depend on it.

    Apple's Vision Pro went on sale in February 2024 with an interface driven by the eyes, finger taps and wrist flicks, and Meta's 2025 display glasses take pinch and swipe gestures through a muscle-sensing wristband. Earlier niche systems, such as Microsoft's Kinect and HoloLens, did similar things, but 2024 is when a mainstream general-purpose computer shipped with gesture as its main input. The arrival is real but small: Vision Pro sold well below expectations, and the film's picture of gesture walls as ordinary office equipment has not happened. 8910

  4. MR-4

    People are identified automatically by biometric scanners as they move through public spaces, without stopping or showing any document.

    ARRIVINGMajorEst. 2032 · range 2028–2045Confidence: medium

    Weight 4/5 · Major: ubiquitous eye scans force Anderton's eye transplant and shape the manhunt.

    The film imagined retinal scanning; the real technology is face recognition from ordinary cameras. London's police now run fixed live facial-recognition cameras in Croydon, which scanned more than 470,000 passers-by in a six-month pilot, and Clearview AI built a searchable database of about 30 billion scraped faces. Iris scanning exists at scale only with consent, through World's Orb. Legal limits are the main brake: European regulators have fined Clearview, the EU AI Act restricts real-time police biometric identification in public spaces, and the date depends on how far democracies other than the UK follow. 11121314

  5. MR-5

    Members of the public ride in cars that drive themselves through city streets with no human driver on board.

    ARRIVEDTextureArrived 2020Confidence: high

    Weight 2/5 · Texture: self-driving cars set the scene and stage one chase.

    Waymo opened fully driverless rides to the public in the Phoenix area in October 2020, and by February 2026 it reported about 400,000 paid rides a week across six US cities. The path has not been smooth: California suspended Cruise's driverless permits in 2023 and General Motors abandoned robotaxi development the following year. The film's fuller vision, of a city where nearly every car runs on an automated network that police can take over remotely, is still a long way off. 15161718

  6. MR-6

    Newspapers are thin, flexible sheets of electronic paper that update their headlines and pictures live while you read them.

    DIVERGEDBackgroundNo arrival expected in this formConfidence: medium

    Weight 1/5 · Background: a passing shot of a live-updating newspaper on the train.

    Flexible electronic paper does exist, and E Ink announced mass production of a plastic-backed panel in 2013, but it refreshes too slowly for moving pictures and never became a news medium. A dedicated e-paper newspaper reader from Plastic Logic was cancelled in 2010 after the iPad arrived. The function the film imagined, news that updates itself as you read, did arrive, but on phones and other glass-screened devices, which are now where most Americans get news, while print has shrunk to a minority habit. 192021

Evidence
  1. AGAINST The Los Angeles Police Department Says It Is Dumping A Controversial Predictive Policing Tool. BuzzFeed News, 2020-04-21. The LAPD, an early adopter since 2011, stopped using PredPol, citing budget pressures. Internal audits had struggled to show that it reduced crime.
  2. AGAINST Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes. The Markup, 2023-10-02. Of 23,631 Geolitica predictions for Plainfield police in 2018, fewer than half of one per cent matched a reported crime of the predicted type.
  3. AGAINST Article 5: Prohibited AI practices. European Commission, AI Act Service Desk, 2024-06-13. Article 5(1)(d) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 bans AI risk assessments that predict whether a person will commit an offence based solely on profiling.
  4. CONTEXT UK: Ministry of Justice secretly developing 'murder prediction' system. Statewatch, 2025-04-08. Documents obtained under freedom of information show a UK research project to identify people at risk of committing homicide, using police data on 100,000 to 500,000 people.
  5. FOR Facial detection used by Westfield malls for targeted advertising. Consumer NZ, 2023-06-30. Shopping-centre screens estimate viewers' age, gender and mood and change adverts accordingly. The supplier says they do not identify individuals.
  6. FOR Canada's privacy regulator to probe billboards equipped with facial scanning tech. The Record from Recorded Future News, 2025-12-12. Billboards near Toronto's Union Station use facial detection for targeted ads (age and gender only, according to the owner). The regulator is investigating.
  7. AGAINST Privacy win for 350,000 people in São Paulo: court blocks facial recognition cameras in metro. Access Now, 2021-05-12. A São Paulo court ordered the metro operator ViaQuatro to stop capturing commuters' faces for advertising without consent, and to pay damages.
  8. FOR Apple Vision Pro available in the U.S. on February 2. Apple Newsroom, 2024-01-08. Apple describes an input system 'controlled entirely by a user's eyes, hands, and voice', with finger taps to select and wrist flicks to scroll.
  9. FOR Meta Ray-Ban Display: AI Glasses With an EMG Wristband. Meta, 2025-09-17. Consumer glasses, on sale from September 2025 at $799, controlled by thumb swipes and pinches read from muscle signals at the wrist.
  10. AGAINST Apple reportedly ceases Vision Pro production amid sluggish sales. SiliconANGLE, 2025-01-01. Citing MacRumors, it reports that production was wound down after sales of about 370,000 units in three quarters, against a target of 700,000 to 800,000 in the first year.
  11. FOR London cops hail fixed facial recognition cams after suspects collared every 35 mins. The Register, 2026-05-13. Two fixed cameras in Croydon led to 173 arrests between October 2025 and March 2026; more than 470,000 people walked past them.
  12. CONTEXT World(coin) must let Europeans comprehensively delete their data, under privacy order. TechCrunch, 2024-12-19. Iris-based identity exists at commercial scale through World's Orb, but Bavaria's data protection authority ordered it to allow full deletion of iris data.
  13. AGAINST Clearview AI hit with its largest GDPR fine yet as Dutch regulator considers holding execs personally liable. TechCrunch, 2024-09-03. The Dutch regulator fined Clearview €30.5 million over its database of about 30 billion scraped facial images.
  14. AGAINST Article 5: Prohibited AI practices. European Commission, AI Act Service Desk, 2024-06-13. Article 5(1)(h) bans real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement except in narrow cases; 5(1)(e) bans untargeted scraping of faces.
  15. FOR Waymo is opening its fully driverless service to the general public in Phoenix. Waymo, 2020-10-08. Waymo One riders in the Phoenix area could hail rides with nobody in the driver's seat.
  16. FOR Waymo Co-CEO Outlines Path to 1 Million Weekly Trips in 2026. Bloomberg (via Claims Journal), 2026-02-12. Waymo reported about 400,000 paid rides a week across six US cities, aiming for more than one million by the end of 2026.
  17. AGAINST DMV Statement on Cruise LLC Suspension. California Department of Motor Vehicles, 2023-10-24. California suspended Cruise's driverless deployment and testing permits, finding its vehicles not safe for public operation.
  18. AGAINST GM to refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles. General Motors, 2024-12-10. GM stopped funding Cruise's robotaxi work, citing the time and money needed to scale it and an increasingly competitive market.
  19. CONTEXT E Ink Introduces Mobius, the First Large Format Flexible Display Technology to Go into Mass Production. E Ink, 2013-05-13. A 13.3-inch flexible e-paper display on a plastic substrate, weighing about 60 grams, slated for mass production.
  20. AGAINST Plastic Logic yanks Que e-reader from its queue. Associated Press (via NBC News), 2010-08-11. The e-paper reader built for newspapers and documents was cancelled before launch, as the iPad and cheaper Kindles reshaped the market.
  21. AGAINST News Platform Fact Sheet. Pew Research Center, 2026-10-19. In 2026, 88% of US adults got news from digital devices often or sometimes, against 22% from printed newspapers or magazines.

Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method