A perfect lie detector: Boon or curse?

[Fumesucker]

According to this article neuroscience seems to be closing in on something that might as well be called the "perfect lie detector".

I can certainly see a perfect lie detector being both a boon and a curse, I rather suspect that the way our society has been going lately such a device would be more likely to be a curse than a boon.

http://www.salon.com/books/neuroscience/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/07/23/lie_detector_excerpt

Where there are people, there are lies. The theory of Machiavellian intelligence claims that our capacity to deceive was developed by virtue of our distant ancestors’ way of life and refined as their primate brains grew and developed more complex structures. Our closest relatives indicate that, from an evolutionary point of view, it has to do with the youngest part of the brain, that outer layer of coiling tissue called the neocortex, which takes up nearly eighty percent of human brain volume. The Scottish primatologist Richard Byrne and his partner Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews have explored the brains and behaviors of eighteen species of primates, and they found a striking connection. The larger the animal’s neocortex, the better they were at deceiving their fellow primates in everyday situations.

Homo sapiens lies all the time. As individuals, we discover the nature of the lie at around the age of three or four and, from then on, it is a natural companion without which only very few can imagine living. You can’t really conceive of a modern, well-functioning society without the lie.

Finding a sure-fire method for revealing lies and deceit is, of course, an age-old dream. And all cultures have had their own traditions and folklore on how to identify the perpetrators. The polygraph, which is an American invention dating back to 1913, is not used much in Europe. In many countries, it is not deemed to provide reliable evidence. In the US, on the other hand, it is used frequently by defense attorneys, prosecutors and police and, according to a Supreme Court decision, it is up to the individual judge whether polygraph data may be used as evidence in a case. The lie detector, however, is under intense attack as ineffectual. There are even organizations – for example AntiPolygraph.org – that are campaigning to scrap the apparatus altogether because of its lack of scientific grounding.

The psychologist Paul Ekman, who is now professor emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco, spent most of his career gaining expertise on how lying is reflected in facial expressions. He developed a Facial Action Coding System, which categorizes thousands of nuanced facial expressions that can be created by combinations of forty-three independent facial muscles.

<snip>

Continue reading the article at the link.

[hobbit709]

1. I say put it on a large screen display every time ANY politician opens their mouth

[Tesha]

2. The trouble is that there are also "errors of incomplete knowledge".

We could all be at an event together, observing the exact same thing.

But afterwards, if someone interviewed each of us and asked "What
happened?", they'd likely get as many different tales as there are
people telling the tale. And the tales would differ. And no one
would be deliberately lying. But because we all integrate new
memories into our existing stock of memories and prejudices, we
will all remember things slightly differently even if we all saw
exactly the same thing. And we don't all see exactly the same
thing anyway!

What would a "perfect lie detector" do with this?

And on another note, what would a "perfect lie detector" do with
a pathological liar, someone whose brain has become so mis-
wired that they have no concept of whether they're telling the
truth or a lie?

Tesha

[MadHound]

3. Doesn't sound so perfect to me, sounds like another fuck up like the lie detector was/is.

Thousands of innocent people went to jail behind the false positives given out by the polygraph machine. In fact, while the public arena no longer accepts the polygraph test as valid a court of law, the corporate world frequently uses a polygraph in matters of employment, costing thousands of innocents jobs or promotions based on this faulty method.

This looks to be the same way, incomplete knowledge, different algorithms, different methodology, not accounting the very individual differences in each human's brain, the hubris to think that we know all we need to know about the brain in order to make this work.

My guess is that this will go mainstream at some point, when you've got DARPA and the government behind something, it generally goes big time. The sad part is that thousands again will suffer because of the faults in this new technology. And in twenty, thirty years we'll find out just how wrong we are.

[hunter]

4. Quoting Albus Dumbledore...

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”