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The recent conversation on anime inspired me to write this review of the best one I've seen so far, not just in terms of Anime, but truly one of the best written stories I've ever seen. I often thought of it as prophetic, but looking back on it for the Nth time, I think a lot the phenomena and trends it talks about were already underway, they just didn't seem so prominent at the time, and so made a good premise for a fanciful sci-fi show.
Spoilers ahoy, although I'm not going to go beat by beat for each and every episode.
Psycho-Pass is set in a post-cyberpunk future, where Japan developed technology capable of looking into our very souls. Thanks to remote brain scans and big data analysis, a hyper-advanced computer system (often referred to by name as the Sybil System) can guide everything, from individual lives to the sociaty as a collective, towards it's optimal path. Various components of the scan form the titular Psycho-Pass (as in: passport) which determines your standing in society. We mostly see the world through the eyes of Akane Tsunemori, a young police inspector, fresh out of the academy. The first 3 episodes are a sort of "tutorial level" for her, where she learns the ropes of police work, and we get to see the basic mechanics of the Psycho-Pass, and how it affects people.
We meet Akane as she's running late for her first assignment: a normie white collar worker got flagged by a street scanner doing a "hue check" - a low resolution vibe check that gets translated into color for readability. The suspect has been determined to be doing a bit too much wrongthink, and was directed by a drone to go to therapy. Not only did he refuse to comply, he grabbed a passerby, took her for a hostage, and ran off to a ghetto full of the homeless and other undesireables. All of this is explained to us by Akane's work partner, inspector Nobuchika Ginoza. Just as he's done with the briefing, they a see a police van arrive, and the rest of the supporting cast disembarks:
The people you're about to meet cannot be considered humans like us.
Their Crime Coefficients all exceed the safety limit. They are people of bankrupt character.
Normally, they would be completely isolated as latent criminals, but they're allowed into the outside world for the sole purpose of flushing out criminals just like themselves.
They're hunting dogs. They're beasts used to hunt beasts. They're what we call “Enforcers”.
They will be your subordinates.
The Crime Coefficient is another component of the Psycho-Pass that measures an individual's propensity towards crime. It's a high resolution measure, that requires specialized hardware, and significantly more compute than a basic Hue Check, so they are not done routinely. Instead, law enforcement are the only ones handling such scanners, which conveniently come attached to a gun called a Dominator, which make the police work rather simple:
- Anyone with a Crime Coefficient below 100 is considered a law-abiding citizen, and is not a subject for any enforcement action. The trigger locks automatically when the gun is aimed at them.
- Values between 100 and 300 mean that the suspect is considered a "latent criminal", and they should be taken into custody. The gun fires in "paralyzer mode" to help facilitate this.
- Above 300 the suspect is subject to a summary execution, and the Dominator switches to "eliminator mode".
- Independently from the Crime Coefficient, there's also a "decomposer mode", which is activated when law enforcement are facing a significant threat, and really need to blast something to kingdom come.
Perhaps I should have said it's the judicial system's work that has been simplified, rather than that of the police, since the police still have to apprehend (and/or execute) criminals, while the entirety of the due process has been replaced with a Crime Coefficient scan. The system is responsive in some ways, but appears very rigid in others. On one hand, we do see update based on incoming data. When they first try to arrest the suspect, it turns out he took stimulants that countered the paralyzer. That act of defiance cost him is life, as the system responded by authorizing his execution. Similarly the hostage moves up and down the scale. First, the trauma of the entire ordeal makes her Crime Coefficient go up to the point where she's considered a latent criminal, and will placed under arrest. Then, upon witnessing the execution (which is done in a particularly gruesome way for no apparent, or explained in-universe, reason) and thinking she's next, she makes a break for it, which causes the Coefficient to go even higher, now authorizing her to be executed as well. Finally, as the resident naive newbie (and young woman), Akane insists on showing her mercy, successfully talks her down from going out in a blaze of glory, and thus the system updates once more, this time downward, and she's merely arrested.
On the other hand, everyone, with the exception of Akane, is acting like once you pass a certain threshold, your life is over. Before he's killed, the kidnapper has a little "what's the punishment for being late?" monologue explaining his actions:
Up until today, I did everything by the book. I spent my whole life walking on eggshells, trying my hardest not to upset or bother anyone.
And yet, I get flagged by one little detector and boom! They already treat me like I'm a criminal.
This is it for me.
Now that it's come to this, it's all over. I'll never be able to get a job, get married, or anything else.
Well, fine then. I've restrained myself all this time. So now, I'll just do whatever I want. I'll take whatever I want. I'll kill anyone I don't like!
You might think maybe he's just an unstable man, failing to see that the system isn't as rigid as he claims, and his life was never over, but even the hostage thinks she's boned, when she's shown her Psycho-Pass. What's more Akane's decision to go easy on the hostage is portrayed as extremely unorthodox. Everyone treats her like she's crazy, and her actions can only be justified by being naive and inexperienced. She spends a good deal of the second episode fighting doubts about her decision, and trying to justify it in the case report*. Luckily for her the hostage ends up improving after being given therapy in custody, but that outcome is implied to be so rare, that the unorthodox nature of her actions are seen as a plausible explanation for it, so she gets to claim it as a justification.
*) You might be thinking "huh, it's a rather ruthless society, if you have to justify not killing a suspect", but "the decision" in question was less about showing mercy to the hostage, and more about shooting one of the enforcers (in paralyser mode) in order to prevent him from carrying out the execution (only has himself to blame, that's what he told her to do). There's also the "blaze of glory" aspect of the situation, where Akane would be putting herself and her subordinates in danger, if things didn't go her way.
The rigidity isn't even limited to the Crime Coefficient. After the kidnapper has been dealt with, the following day Akane meets up with her friends for coffee, and in the course of the conversation it turns out that in the Psycho-Pass universe, Akane has a super-power - the power of choice. One of the blessings of the Sybil System is it's ability predict how well suited each individual is for a given job, and Akane was found to have (top!) aptitude for jobs at all thirteen ministries and agencies, and six companies. Faced with so much choice, she also faces doubts like "what is my purpose in life?" which everyone else finds extremely annoying. One of her friends does manual labor, and the other is an IT worker, and neither has any prospect of ever doing anything else in their lives. Later on she also has lunch with one of the enforcers - Shusei Kagari - who's situation is even more dire. Enforcers are nothing but convicts with aptitude for police work, and Kagari was declared a latent criminal when he was still a child. His only choice in life was to either rot in prison, or work for the Public Safety Bureau in return for better living conditions, and a sliver of freedom (enforcers can even leave the PSB compund as long as they're accompanied by an inspector).
Another one of Akane's "superpowers" that's briefly mentioned, is that her Psycho-Pass tends be good. Why that is, is initially a matter of some speculation, and finally spelled out in the later episodes, but it seems to boil down to her stoic life philosophy. In any case, she seems to be unaffected even by events that would mess other people right up, while everyone else, who isn't already a latent criminal, goes through life stressing out trying to manage their "Hue". The third episode, possibly the first mission outside of the "tutorial level" explores that - and how it can go horribly wrong - a bit more. Akane's division is assigned to investigate suspicious deaths in a drone factory. Originally all ruled accidental, their mere frequency raised suspicions. No direct evidence of foul play is found, but the investigation reveals disturbing dynamics between the workers. For security reasons the entire factory is completely cut off from the interwebs, and they have to make do with what they have around for entertainment, which is not a lot. So, as is perhaps not uncommon in male-heavy environments, the workers as a group tend to periodically pick a victim and bully the shit out of him to blow off some steam. The director of the factory is aware of this, and allows it, as it's good for collective morale. When any particular worker gets bullied too much, and their Hue gets too messed up, he rotates him out and lets another schmuck take his place. However, no one's been rotated out in quite a while, as the most recent designated whipping boy's Hue seems to periodically recover on it's own... and the times of the recovery are curiously aligned with the times of his coworkers' deaths. Plot twist! Turns out the whipping boy has been blowing off some steam of his own.
One of the fascinating aspects of the show is the blurry line between what is meant to be a statement about the impact of technology on society, and what is an allegory for how society already operates. In interviews the show's creators often hint at most of it being the latter, and it makes sense. Psycho-Pass was written in 2014, AI was still a distant dream, and many technologically mediated social trends it talks about were still in their infancy, if they even can be said to have come about at all. Information revealed in later episodes even makes it clear that the Sybil System isn't exactly an AI in-universe, and shouldn't be interpreted to be about the impact of technology on society, at least not exclusively. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, but for now, since the story is leaning in the AI direction, and since so much progress has been made in the field IRL, it's hard not to dwell on it a little bit.
I've had my fair share of rants about Rationalists and how they get AI wrong, Psycho-Pass is how I think you get it right. Stop worrying about agentic superhuman conscious intelligences, and start worrying about systems for mass surveilence and control. Worry less about existential risks coming from misalignment, and more about existential crises people will face when you sucked all humanity out of their daily lives. Remote brainscans might seem fanciful, but between SocMeds, smart watches, and smartphones, do we even need to scan brains to get something like the Sybil System? China already has their Social Credit System that doesn't seem all that different from Sybil, Europe seems like it would like to have one as well, along with a uniquely identifying digital identity, or a (state manged) digital currency And in case we do need to scan brains to get something like the Psycho-Pass, well it's not entirely out of the question. Every time I rewatch the show I end up thinking it's scary how relevant it is.
The conversation between Akane and her friends always makes me smile, because I had one eerily similar to it ages ago, with an old friend of mine facing a similar choice dillema, who ended up pining for a Sybil System to come into existence! "Wouldn't it be great", she said, "if there was a machine that could tell you what job you'd be good at, and would enjoy doing?". It's another thing that I think we're more likely to get than an AGI, and it's a good question if we really want it. The idea that people prefer to have a "human element" in a system instead of everything being decided by a machine has been a trope in sci-fi for a while, but despite being the resident Luddite, I'm starting to wonder if this is true. We're not even that far up the AI tech-tree, and I'm already hearing "but ChatGPT said..." as an argument enough times to make me want to pull my hair out. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it's healthier for people have such a human element, as demonstrated by the growing collective unhappiness, the more exposed to technology we become.
Other than all the food for thought, the show has some great character development. Since these are the introductory episodes there's not much to write home about yet, but here's the general run-down.
Akane is still inexperienced and is constantly wrecked with doubts, but over the course of the show we see her grow in skill and confidence. A fairly common trope in anime, but depressingly rare in western storytelling, and it ivariably makes me shake my head to think how much drama about Mary Sues we could have been spared if Hollywood copied a few notes from Japan.
Although I haven't mentioned his name yet, the other main protagonist of the show is enforcer Shinya Kogami, the poor bloke that got shot by Akane in episode 1. He's one of these dark and broody types with a quest for vengence, and set up as the counterpart for the story's main villain (to be disclosed). Though the thing I find interesting about him is his skepticism, if not quiet resentment, of the Sybil System, and how he chooses to process it (in contrast to the currently undisclosed villain).
Inspector Ginoza is dark and broody in his own way, and seemingly disdainful of the enforcers (he's the one that delivered the little speech about them not being entirely human), but it turns out his motivations are understandable, and his intentions relatively noble. We get to see some of the setup for his arc in episode 3, as Akane discovers there's some tension between him, and enforcer Tomomi Masaoka, which is apparently a touchy subject for both. It has a very moving resolution by the end of the show, but that's another bridge we'll cross when we get there. As for Masaoka, he's an "old dog" detective, with his own interesting backstory of how he became a latent criminal.
I already mentioned enforcer Kagari, he's more aloof and tends act like a goofball most of the time, but has these nice moments of depth, like his conversation with Akane that I mentioned above.
The final enforcer of the team is Yayoi Kunizuka who... well, doesn't really do that much, but gets a pretty good backstory episode later on. And last but not least is analyst Shion Karanomori a somewhat manic superhacker that supports the team back from HQ.
To be continued...
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