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The minority report
The whole idea of a minority report is so significant to the story because it represents doubt and the possibility of an alternate future. This doubt is the very reason Kaplan is so eager to manipulate Anderton into bringing him the report. In the narrative surrounding Precrime, there is an illusion of absolute surety. Lisa voices this belief when Anderton asserts that giving potential murderers the opportunity to learn that their name has come up in the machine would be too much of a risk. She doesn’t understand how anything could be left to chance when precogs exist to predict the future. However, as Fleming’s note highlights, even if a majority of the precogs agree on a future, that inherently means there is a minority—one precog who disagrees. The very existence of an outlier means there’s room for doubt. The surety of the system is called even further into question when Anderton discovers that technically none of the precogs agree on the circumstances around Kaplan’s murder. Each prediction is a slightly different time path, all of which at one point has the potential to be true.
The precogs
The precogs represent the dehumanization inherent in society. Although they have committed no crime, the fact that they have intellectual disabilities gives the state the right to strip them of their bodily autonomy and transform them into oracular mutants. This process takes away their higher brain functions, meaning their only actions as living beings are to make predictions for the computer to analyze. People callously refer to them as “monkeys,” and their names are written with quotations around them as if they are not really people with distinct names and identities. Furthermore, although the word “precog” is short for “precognitive,” the word also evokes cogs, as in the parts of a machine. The precogs literally are cogs in the machinery that is the Precrime computer. They symbolize how Precrime, at its very essence, can only work through dehumanization, through the sublimation of people into the system.
