With AIOps, IT has reached its own Minority Report era

The film industry is renowned for vividly depicting an imagined near future. Think humanoid robots (I, Robot), memory erasure (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or even life extension (Vanilla Sky). Inevitably, some portrayals and predictions are wide of the mark; others, however, give viewers a glimpse of what technology is to come.

While we still haven’t unlocked the full potential of fully automated cars or jetpack transportation, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the novel, Minority Report, managed to correctly anticipate some aspects of the future – such as personalized digital ads, iris recognition software and kinetic virtual interfaces. Subtly, though, the film’s most central theme has become its most prescient: technology capable of predetermination.

Set in 2054, the sci-fi whodunnit imagines a world in which a trio of ‘precognitive’ humans can foresee violent crimes before they’re committed. Tom Cruise stars as a detective accused of ‘future-murder’, with the narrative following his attempts to acquire the titular ‘report’, alleged to contain information integral to the incriminating prophecy.

In reality, it’s fair to say we tend not to rely on clairvoyants as credible sources for identifying impending issues. However, the film’s ‘pre-crime’ measures do share similarities with the ways we now use AI tools to protect our digital ecosystems – coincidentally bringing Gartner’s premonition to life that ‘there is no future of IT operations that doesn’t include artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps)’.

Perhaps the modern-day relevance of the 22-year-old Minority Report is why a stage adaptation was launched in the…