An Eye-Scanning Lie Detector Is Forging a Dystopian Future (wired.com) 113
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sitting in front of a Converus EyeDetect station, it's impossible not to think of Blade Runner. In the 1982 sci-fi classic, Harrison Ford's rumpled detective identifies artificial humans using a steam-punk Voight-Kampff device that watches their eyes while they answer surreal questions. EyeDetect's questions are less philosophical, and the penalty for failure is less fatal (Ford's character would whip out a gun and shoot). But the basic idea is the same: By capturing imperceptible changes in a participant's eyes -- measuring things like pupil dilation and reaction time -- the device aims to sort deceptive humanoids from genuine ones.
It claims to be, in short, a next-generation lie detector. Polygraph tests are a $2 billion industry in the US and, despite their inaccuracy, are widely used to screen candidates for government jobs. Released in 2014 by Converus, a Mark Cuban-funded startup, EyeDetect is pitched by its makers as a faster, cheaper, and more accurate alternative to the notoriously unreliable polygraph. By many measures, EyeDetect appears to be the future of lie detection -- and it's already being used by local and federal agencies to screen job applicants.
It claims to be, in short, a next-generation lie detector. Polygraph tests are a $2 billion industry in the US and, despite their inaccuracy, are widely used to screen candidates for government jobs. Released in 2014 by Converus, a Mark Cuban-funded startup, EyeDetect is pitched by its makers as a faster, cheaper, and more accurate alternative to the notoriously unreliable polygraph. By many measures, EyeDetect appears to be the future of lie detection -- and it's already being used by local and federal agencies to screen job applicants.
Re:This is dumb. (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless they are comfortable with lying.
In the 1980's Southland corporation gave up using lie detection as a pre-screening tool in selecting employees. They were actually selecting better liars, not excluding the dishonest.
Back then the majority of minimum wage jobs were performed by teenagers (like I was at the time). Funny thing about teens is that they aren't grown up yet. Teens don't have a great deal of life experience. That includes failure, and having their integrity questioned. When you question the integrity of a confident, experienced adult, they can handle it. Question a kid, and you make them uncomfortable, nervous, twitchy. They don't have the experience and confidence to handle it.
Unless they are already accomplished liars and are comfortable and experienced at having their integrity and motives questioned.
TL;DR, southland actually had an increase in employee theft thanks to their use of lie detectors as a employment tool. https://newsok.com/article/203... [newsok.com] https://www.cia.gov/library/re... [cia.gov]
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Adults that are confident and experienced? Damn, I'm moving to wherever you live.
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"Unless they are comfortable with lying. "
That's what he said.
"Anyone who can read body language knows all you can tell is whether a person is comfortable or unconfortable, not whether they are lying."
No correlation between biometrics and honesty (Score:1)
There is no correlation at all between externally measured biometrics and honesty. Lie "detectors" always have been, are today, and will always be snake oil. If you want to detect lies, there are probably just two ways to do it. One of those could be an fMRI, assuming we have a complete and unimpeachable understanding of the areas of the brain that control honesty. The other could be drugs.
Perhaps a third could be physical coercion, but nobody wants to talk about torture anymore despite its history of effic
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Can people control their eye dilation like that?
Re:No correlation between biometrics and honesty (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you heard of any scientific study that correlates dilation of the pupil with lying? I haven't.
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It would be very difficult to do a valid study. There is a lot of difference between lying about a circle or cross on hidden playing card, and lying about whether you gave the Russians your password, which is again different from whether you cheated on your wife.
In many case truth vs lie may not even be all that well defined.
For those and many other reasons, until I see refereed journal studies, I have 0 confidence in any "lie detector".
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The problem is that you don't have some sort of special organ in your body for lying, or some sort of hardware lie blocker in your brain that requires you to set a hardware flag before lying.
It doesn't exist, and so you're not going to be able to test for it.
It is like trying to test why a person is drinking a beverage by measuring the properties of the beverage as they drink it. It is Apples and Oranges. And the thing that is desired to test doesn't even have its own physical mechanism; it is an externalit
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This. We're expressing an infantile desire for a tidy binary outcome, truth or lie.
Meanwhile ITRW our utterances are a manifestation of a mental process. A thought. Generally we equate the two. "I think that pen is blue". Except when you look closer, that's obviously not how thoughts really-really work. When you look closer, we "lie to ourselves" all the time. Thoughts are speculative, interpretive, they estimate and surmise, they settle for half-certainty and not absolutes. "I *might* have seen certain pat
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And yet... this makes no sense whatever... the law makes exceptions for police, and positions that involve "national security".
IMO, that's the height of stupidity. If you KNOW the dam
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The problem is that you don't have some sort of special organ in your body for lying, or some sort of hardware lie blocker in your brain that requires you to set a hardware flag before lying.
Large brain size may have evolved in part for exactly the purposes of deceiving and detecting deception in a social species. And like many brain functions, they use specialized structures and require training.
Re:No correlation between biometrics and honesty (Score:5, Informative)
Really? I thought that people tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear.
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In context, an inefficient result disproves efficacy.
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An ocean of false positives is not efficient - you're stuck with figuring out which one is the truth, so you're back to square one.
False results are efficient if they are irrelevant because torture is about something more important.
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No, they'll tell you whatever they think you want to hear.
Re:No correlation between biometrics and honesty (Score:5, Interesting)
Lie "detectors" always have been, are today, and will always be snake oil.
Not true. They work and they are useful... if the subject being interrogated believes they work.
It's almost like the placebo effect, except that placebo effectiveness is around 20 percent, whereas lie detector effectiveness is over 50 percent (and sometimes approaches 80 percent). Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert comics) explained this on his blog. He is a trained hypnotist and studies mental persuasion.
Yes you can easily beat any polygraph if you receive training. But how many people in the general population actually get such training? And btw it's not enough to hear or read about how polygraphs don't work, you actually have to have some first-hand experience on how they operate... you need to see for yourself that you can manipulate the readings by doing various things (thinking different thoughts, feeling discomfort and pain by deliberately doing things like stepping on a nail hidden in your shoe, etc)
Case in point: when you join a spy agency, they don't just tell you that polygraphs aren't scientific and they don't work, so don't worry about it. They give you actual live training on how to beat it. Because just tellling you about it isn't enough.
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The very first thing they teach you in how to 'survive' torture is that everyone breaks. EVERYONE. Training simply gives you tools that will allow you to last long e
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Re: No correlation between biometrics and honesty (Score:2)
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That's not true.
Outside a court of law hearsay and even double hearsay is pretty acceptable.
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In Illinois double hearsay is now legally accepted in a Court of Law. https://www.meczyklaw.com/Arti... [meczyklaw.com]
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So Honesty is Dystopian? (Score:2)
Re:So Honesty is Dystopian? (Score:5, Informative)
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Or, as in this case, even when you can't do that, it might still be used by the government in some other way that gives them leverage; like using it as a personality detector to choose which sort of people the government hires, when doing so honestly wouldn't be allowed.
In that sense, it does detect lies; find a place where the machine is in use, and you've found a place where people are lying about what the machine does! 100% success rate AFAICT!
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Exactly, if you can 'prove' someone is lying with my black box of pseudoscience in a court of law then that gives you a lot of leverage.
It works for drug sniffing dogs and the courts and legislatures do not care.
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That's an argument against existing lie-detectors as well.
What's particularly "dystopian" about this new device?..
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Because now we're in the future.
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The problem isn't simply honest vs. dishonesty, but that the system is rigid and authoritarian in ways that it's nearly impossible to compliant with.
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The problem with a perfect lie detector arises when it's only ever used on certain people. The people in power will never subject themselves to it, while gleefully using it on the people they rule over to assure obedience. That's how it becomes dystopian. It's fine in an already-free society. But it becomes a tool for those in power to prevent a non-free society from becoming free. And since no society is really ever completely
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I love how civilians freak out (Score:3)
Look, it's not hard to fool any biometric methods for detecting lies. They all are just measuring how you react to lying. If you believe (even incorrectly) that the lie is not a lie, or not important, they fail to detect it.
They're looking for response. Kind of like the reverse of the Blade Runner detection, which looked for abnormal non-reaction to things that create reactions, and reaction to theings that don't create reactions.
This will only catch people who want to get high, and poor people. Wealthy people will be coached in how to avoid detection.
Re:I love how civilians freak out (Score:4, Interesting)
You can beat a polygraph by clenching your sphincter when answering questions, it causes a slight skin flush and rise in blood pleasure which is how the polygraph measures "lies", but they have to establish a baseline so if you do it every single time you answer a question the detection system can't see deception.
Polygraphs are pseudo-science bullshit, and it astounds me to this day that they are still given any weight at all. Europe realized they were pseudo-science and barred their use for any reason, private or public, at all because they DON'T WORK.And best case is they just point you in the wrong direction.
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You can beat a polygraph by clenching your sphincter when answering questions
These days my sphincter is constantly clenched.
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You're just begging for a repeat procedure with a clenchometer jammed somewhere uncomfortable.
And since sphincters are a class of muscles, with enough determination, you could earn yourself the ins
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No, you can't. The interrogator will see the change every time, including on the calibration questions, and see the obvious difference between that and the neutral intra-question period. While it may mess up the measurements, it won't look like a "truthful" (aka, calm) response.
You don't know what you're talking about, the change "clenching" causes is within the same natural variation you'll see with a response to any question or even thinking about something completely unrelated and it obscures any bullshit measurement of "deception". It basically raises the threshold to the point that any other signal that may or may not be present when answering a question is completely obscured.
Skin temp, flush and blood pressure fluctuate quite a bit just sitting doing nothing. Polygraph's re
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Wealthy people will be coached in how to avoid detection.
If this has the same problems as current polygraph equipment, you want have to pay a lot of money to get advice that consist of being told "to just relax":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Do not lie to Friend Computer.
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Also, if you experience physical revulsion at being interrogated for things they don't have any reason to suspect you of, (which is itself a type of lie!) then you'll fail the test too.
So people who dislike lying but are lying anyways will be detected, as will people who are more honest than average! I personally suspect it is the latter group that they actually are trying to exclude, for similar reasons that they want to exclude the people bad at lying. If you're good at lying, you pass; that is probably b
Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
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On the downside there'd be a sudden C4 shortage. The CIA will be very cross.
Not steampunk. (Score:1)
Blade Runner, and by extension the Voight-Kampff machine are cyberpunk, not steampunk.
No he didn't (Score:5, Informative)
>>Ford's character would whip out a gun and shoot
Did you even see the film??
Re:No he didn't (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the author of TFS was thinking of Han Solo and Greedo?
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My mother?
Yeah.
Let me tell you about my mother. BOOM!!!
Re:No he didn't (Score:4, Funny)
Yes I did. Han shot first, no matter what Lucas says now.
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I would prefer the lie detectors to work like on Star Trek (the original 1960s series). You put your hand on the white light, and the machine speaks up if you're telling a lie. Or in Mudd's Women, where it detects a lie without putting a hand on the white light.
Keeping images in your head. (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, you aren't a pathological liar. Can you focus on images, at least? You want a positive emotional response? Focus your mind on sex while answering a question. You'll inhale, your pupils will dilate, skin thermal and electrical properties will change. For an opposite reaction, focus on maggots on an open wound on your arm.
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The "trick" is to understand that it's all fake. It's just theater meant to scare the participant into telling the truth. So just relax and answer the questions.
What weakness? (Score:2)
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Maggots make me hot.
Sigh. (Score:3)
"Polygraph tests are a $2 billion industry in the US"
And completely inadmissable in any court in every developed country.
They're bunk. Nonsense. Tripe. Bullshit.
This one will be no different.
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I said developed country.
We can count ourselves lucky (Score:2)
There aren't any smartphone apps or dating sites using this (yet)
I guess psychopaths and sociopaths (maybe redundant or CEOs) will be the real winners in the
Voight-Kampff tests.
Lie detectors, of all types, are BS (Score:2)
They are a prop to intimidate the person being interrogated. It doesn't matter if it squiggles lines on paper or scans your eyeball, it's nothing but theater. A lie detector test is nothing more than an interrogation.
In the immortal words of George Costanza, advising Jerry how to beat a lie detector test: "it isn't a lie if you believe it".
Updated in 2018 by Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth."
no just the one from paycheck (Score:2)
no just the one from paycheck
Seriously. (Score:2)
Looking for VC funding. I am about to apply for a patent that for a software system that measures imperceptible changes in keystrokes as users are asked to type answers to questions that that then converted into probabilities that the answers are lies.
Of course the system is completely bogus and only returns random noise that is then interpreted however the technician feels like that day. But who the F cares. Money.
Call me for more information on how to invest.
Our duty as employee (Score:2)
Our duty as employee is to serve our shareholders. The shareholders with voting rights. The shareholders with majority rights. That is Mark if you didn't know.
I use FB, maybe even on a daily basis but rarely post anything. Comments, likes fine. No mobile app, only desktop. Single private session (not shared with any other browsing). Never clicked on any ad in 5+ years. I am the type of person, FB wishes shouldn't exist (besides those who don't use it at all). The only people I see in my "people you may know
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That is Mark if you didn't know.
Did you post this on the correct thread? This has to do with Mark Cuban, not Zuckerberg.
I remember that (Score:2)
"How many questions?"
"Twenty, thirty, cross referenced."
"It took over a hundred questions for Al Gore, didn't it?"
Mixed genres. (Score:2)
Steam punk? STEAM PUNK!?!?! Turn in your nerd card now AC....
$2 billion industry (Score:2)
I've got a warehouse full of surplus British bomb detection devices [wikipedia.org] to move. How can I get a part of this action?
How to detect lies (Score:2)
A person who wants to work for a company, brand.
Look at their carefully created CV, resume and any other work related history.
Build that out to a list of education and locations. People they knew, know, studied with and who educated them. Friends and type of education.
Did they get further in education on merit? A free pass to get further in education for non academic reasons?
Politics and education at that time? Friends with activists,
You know what would set this thing off? (Score:1)
Reading a teleprompter. Seems about right. If a politician is reading from one, chances are he/she is lying. I wish they would speak from the heart, without the cue cards. The profanity was at least original.
Snow Crash (Score:1)
We're veering ever closer to the kind of 'Government Jobs' portrayed in Snow Crash.
Worse than useless.... (Score:2)
So the people who pass the test are :
Those who don't think they are lying .. oh and those who are not lying
Those who don't care if they are lying
Those who don't think the machine can detect them lying
Those who have been trained to beat the machine
It will catch those:
Those who are worried about it wrongly detecting they are lying when they are not - these ar