Pre-crime, also spelled precrime, is the idea that the occurrence of a crime can be anticipated before it happens. The term was coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick, and is increasingly used in academic literature to describe and criticise the tendency in criminal justice systems to focus on crimes not yet committed. Pre-crime intervenes to punish, disrupt, incapacitate, or restrict those deemed to embody future crime threats. As a term, it embodies a temporal paradox, suggesting both that a crime has not yet occurred and that it is a foregone conclusion.
Pre-crime, also spelled precrime, is the idea that the occurrence of a crime can be anticipated before it happens. The term was coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick, and is increasingly used in academic literature to describe and criticise the tendency in criminal justice systems to focus on crimes not yet committed. Pre-crime intervenes to punish, disrupt, incapacitate, or restrict those deemed to embody future crime threats. As a term, it embodies a temporal paradox, suggesting both that a crime has not yet occurred and that it is a foregone conclusion.
==Origins of the concept== George Orwell introduced a similar concept in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four using the term "thoughtcrime" to describe illegal thoughts that held banned opinions about the ruling government or intentions to act against it. A large part of how it differs from pre-crime is in its absolute prohibition of anti-authority ideas and emotions, regardless of the consideration of any physical revolutionary acts; however, Orwell was describing behaviour he saw in governments of his day as well as extrapolating on that behaviour, and so his ideas were themselves rooted in real political history and current events.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).