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Lie Detector Glasses Coming Soon
Zelphyr writes "The EE Times is reporting on a product soon to be released by an Israeli company that allows the wearer of special glasses to tell whether the person they are talking to is telling a lie. Not only that, they can tell you whether someone loves you! Apparently a PC version of the 'love detector' is in the works as well. Think my Windows box will be upset when it knows how much I hate it?"
People might start watching politicians while wearing them.
There are serious doubts as to whether polygraph machines actually work or are simply junk science... and that criticism is of using polygraphs in a controlled environment like an interrogation room used by law-enforcement types. Now this company wants us to believe that an under-paid & under-trained security screener working in a chaotic environment like a busy airport is going to be able to detect a lie using their unproven product? Ha!
Not to troll, but maybe technology has changed since '96-'97. It's entirely possible (and likely) that they've done more (and better?) research since then.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's from Israel, isn't it? If El Al isn't using these for security, I don't see any reason to trust them to work.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Too many experts can beat it and too many amateurs get nervous and give false positives.
Amateurs... you mean, normal people?
Polygraph tests, and probably these glasses, too, make far too many assumptions about certain physiological responses which occur when someone is not being truthful. Firstly, they assume that a raise in heart rate or pulse can only mean that the person is lying, which is simply untrue. Secondly, unlike polygraphs, there's no way for these glasses to perform a control on the person being examined (meaning that you measure what a person's "normal" physiological patterns are like). And even those controls performed are dubious, at best, because there are simply too many variables to consider. Even in basic psychology classes, they go into the problems with polygraphs in detail, and it's not hard to deconstruct the test's assumptions, even for first-year university students.
Suppose you went up to a girl and asked her when the last time she gave a blow job was, and she answers you (hypothetically, she'd probably slap you in reality). You'd probably register a raise in blood pressure and heart rate. Are you to conclude that she lied to you? No, that's simply absurd. You asked her a personal question, out of the blue. Of course she'd be surprised. Furthermore, are you going to act normally and cooly when someone with glasses that can supposedly tell whether you're lying or not is asking you questions? Probably not. If you're an innocent man being polygraphed to see if you've committed a relatively serious crime, you're not exactly going to be acting normally, either.
Polygraph results are inadmissible in court for a good reason. I have a very hard time buying their "96% accurate" figure.
Anyone that accepts that the traditional polygraph has an 83% "accuracy" is obviously starting from a different viewpoint than the rest of us. Still with law-enforcement agencies being willing to hire psychics and dowsers we shouldn't be too surprised at seeing contra-rational thinking being employed by people that don't understand science.
The way I see it, there are major ethical implications to this kind of technology. I can see it now - the first attempted use of this in a rape defense - "According to my glasses, she was lying when she said 'no', and also, she loved me!!"
Even if these things were 100% effective (and there are serious philosophical problems with ever being able to show that empirically), I think they'd be a bad idea. Believe it or not, dishonesty has its place in the maintenance of interpersonal relations. Utterly getting rid of it would likely end up being worse than the problem that we're trying to solve. Better is to help people use their own built-in ability to detect emotions/truthfulness more effectively.
Finally, any technology (currently at least) that does sucessfully detect emotions will be prone to the same kind of 'arms race' that we see in spam detection. 'Professional' liers will learn to slip by the system, rendering whatever advantage it gave us meaningless.
If my enemy's enemy is my friend, what happens if my enemy is his own worst enemy?
And they need to do it without tipping that person off. A problem with suicide bombers is that rumbling them away from the intended target can just cause them to improvise. Security checkpoints are nice and busy, and so are buses and shopping streets. It doesn't tip the balance if someone just blows himself up somewhere else that's still packed with people.
Let him testify under oath about the whole story!
Think that will happen? Haha! Not a fuckin chance.
He's been jacked full of mind-screwing drugs since the day he was taken by the US, and is being brainwashed as we speak, by US 'intelligence' operatives.
"No! I never spoke to Cheney!"
"No! I never shook hands with Rumsfeld or George Bush Sr!"
"No! I never purchased poison gas from Americans!"
"Yes! I played footsie with Osama every night!"
That means 1 out of 10 innocent passengers will be harrassed as suspected terrorists and 1 out of 10 terrorists will be allowed through.
No, it means that 1 out of 10 innocent passengers will be harrassed and 1 out of 10 terrorists will have to learn how to trick it. A guilty person can learn how to fool a lie detector, but an innocent person has no reason to.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Try 89% (from the article), but that number is also made up. I see nothing here that reliably demonstrates that this "lie detector" actually works. All this "voice analysis" is basically wishful thinking, and in the hands of a jack-booted thug, it is just another tool to take away what little liberty we might have left.
The only thing worse than a lie detector that doesn't work, is one that does .
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But in my life, there have been several instances where someone who initially bores me or totally annoys me eventually grows on me, so that we become friends -- something that wouldn't have happened if I'd been rude and just told them off; and I've been on the receiving end of that too. I had a good friend tell me that when he first met me, he thought I was just an arrogant American and had no interest in getting to know be better; eventually we became really good friends.
So with the "love glasses": even if they're 96% accurate as far as what's going on in the person's head right now, they're not necessarily that useful for what's going to happen in the future. The person who just thinks you're a nice guy, or even doesn't really care for you now, may get to know you better and begin to like you; and the person who is initially attracted to you and thinks your cute may realize you're not really her type.
So this may be useful if you're just looking for one-night-stands, but if you're looking for anything else, I'd say it's best to stick with the social cues. They developed for a reason.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
If a woman thinks an erection is a good way of knowing that a man loves her, then she probably believes he'll still respect her in the morning, too!
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Are you trolling? Venuezuala is a western democracy(mostly) , and there are actually some white looking people living there. And Iraq had a genocidal despot for a leader. It's people are also brown and easily painted with the terrorist brush by some of the more rabid elements of the media, and the unthinking masses can be confused into thinking they had something to do with 9/11.
If they can spot somebody beforehand, they can at least kill the bomber before (s)he can kill others; apprehension is pretty much not an option.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
"Honey, do you still love me?"
"Mr. Sontag, this is all really just a load of crap, right?"
"What's the lowest price you can give me on this car?"
"Are you employed by any law enforcement organization?"
"Are those real?"
"Do you solemnly swear to defend and protect the constitution of the United States of America, and to execute the duties of the office of the Presidency to the best of your ability, so help you God?"