From: Stephen Adamson (stephenk@spiritone.com)
Date: Thu Dec 17 1998 - 01:38:03 MST
The book (for the latecomers, "The Truth Machine" by James Halperin), to its
credit, doesn't try to explain HOW it is done, you just understand that it has
been done. It is a good read, no matter what you believe about the future; but it
develops a lot of the threads discussed here-- AI, nanomachines, alt. medicine,
cloning, cryogenics-- as secondary plot to the main. (Each chapter, 3 - 5 years
later than the previous, starts with related and unrelated current headlines to
keep the reader up to speed).
While I don't think that it is technically impossible, one of the things that
bothered me is that the machine would "flicker" when it detected a partial truth
or a withholding of facts, which expands the complications of such a machine
infinitely.
As far as the sociological aspects of such a machine, one aspect was an
initial wave of suicides. In this book the market embraced it, however, to
eventually having "wrist truth machines" for when a girl asks her man if she
looks good today.
I wonder. The other thing, of course, is that kind of invention would be so
dangerous to the people in power (such as our Perjurer-in-Chief =) ) that it
would probably be squashed and destroyed immediately. At least, it would be
denied federal funding.
Stephen Adamson
www.spiritone.com/~stephenk
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> JKC has noted that evolution has put a tremendous amount of effort into
> detecting and concealing lies, so a perfect truth machine is unlikely.
>
> I say exactly the opposite: Evolution has put so much effort into lies
> that there's probably a module of the brain devoted to lying (anyone
> know if someone's looked for it?), and thus it might be very easy to
> detect activity with an fMRI. Evolution baffles verbal and kinesic
> perceptions, but would have absolutely no reason to defend against
> neuroimaging. The inventor might not even need much cognitive science;
> a neural net might be very easily trainable to decode "lying" brain activity.
>
> Biofeedback could probably suppress the "lying" cues, but not the
> resulting "subject is using biofeedback" cues.
>
> Do I swear it would work? Of course not. But as a science-fictional
> premise, it is completely plausible. What is not plausible, IMHO, is
> that this invention would result in an age of world peace. Widespread
> violent chaos followed by totally new forms of government would be my guess.
>
> The effect would be to strengthen all forms of power. Democracies could
> enforce honesty; dictators could enforce obedience. The democracies
> would win, but first there'd be an interregnum in the democracy -
> politicians and bureaucracies, faced with en masse unemployment, would
> band together and do anything to hold onto power. (The modern U.S. is a
> factionalized oligarchy with the demos holding the balance of power, and
> the oligarchic factions competing to please the demos. The threat of a
> truth machine might cause the factions to unite against the demos, like
> term limits but more so.)
> --
> sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
> http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
> Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
> everything I think I know.
-- Check out my website! http://www.spiritone.com/~stephenk/
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