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Robot Interprets, Plays Back Dreams
foobarx writes "Digital artists have created a humanoid robot which uses brainwave activity recorded during sleep to playback an interpretation of your dreams. The artists, Brendan Burns and Fernando Orellana used machine learning to find patterns in the brainwaves and then matched these patterns to dreams which they remembered having. Others have noted the possible hazards of this new technology."
... it moves its head based on eye movements, and dances around based on EEG data. There's no actual interpretation of the content of the dream, other than that more active EEG and REM periods correspond to more activity from the robot. It wouldn't know if you were dreaming about flying, or about Eva Longoria, or about going for a jog.
Except none of that is true. It'd be nice for defendants if it were, but the privilege against self-incrimination does not apply to physical evidence. The Supreme Court has never held there to be a self-incrimination right against giving PHYSICAL evidence -- just to forced TESTIMONY (getting up on the stand and actually describing what happened).
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from forcing you to participate in a lineup.
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from requesting a handwriting sample or a fingerprint.
The 5th Amendment does NOT stop the police from requesting a voice sample.
See, eg here ("It is long settled law that fingerprinting does not violate the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against compelled self-incrimination or the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Indeed, much non-testimonial evidence does not fall under those constitutional protections, including the analysis of blood and breath for alcohol. Samples of semen, hair, and other tissues may be taken without a suspect's consent.").
See also Schember v. California, where the Supreme Court reiterated that the 5th Amendment protects against compelled testimony primarily in the spoken word sense. Blood tests weren't compelled "testimony," even if they were "compelled" in the sense that they were forcible, over protests.
We can write laws that prohibit forced fingerprints, or forced handwriting samples -- call your Congressperson and tell them to do so if that's what you believe. But there's no right in the Constitution about that.
The headline and summary are almost worse than TFA in terms of being misleading junk. Almost.
TFA: > Using an algorithm, the creators discovered a set of brainwave patterns, to each pattern a pre-programmed behavior was assigned.
They *assigned* a pre-programmed behavior to an EEG pattern. The programmed behavior has nothing to do with what was actually going on in the mind.
They seem to entirely skip over the fact that EEG patterns can be identical to the point of high statistical significance and be cause by extremely different stimuli.
"Using an algorithm".... well, that makes it all scientifical and everything, so that's OK then. What a verbal turd.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B