Researchers Design Bot To Conduct National Security Clearance Interviews 102
meghan elizabeth (3689911) writes Advancing a career in the U.S. government might soon require an interview with a computer-generated head who wants to know about that time you took ketamine. A recent study by psychologists at the National Center for Credibility Assessment, published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior, asserts that not only would a computer-generated interviewer be less "time consuming, labor intensive, and costly to the Federal Government," people are actually more likely to admit things to the bot.
Eliza finds a new job.
So there's this tortoise (Score:5, Insightful)
Holden: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down...
Leon: What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: It doesn't make any difference what desert, it's completely hypothetical.
Leon: But, how come I'd be there?
Holden: Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise, Leon. It's crawling toward you...
Leon: Tortoise? What's that?
Holden: [irritated by Leon's interruptions] You know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course!
Holden: Same thing.
Leon: I've never seen a turtle... But I understand what you mean.
Holden: You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon.
Leon: Do you make up these questions, Mr. Holden? Or do they write 'em down for you?
Holden: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
Leon: [angry at the suggestion] What do you mean, I'm not helping?
Holden: I mean: you're not helping! Why is that, Leon?
[Leon has become visibly shaken]
Holden: They're just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, they're written down for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response... Shall we continue?
Re:Robo-Polygraph? (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got a mistake here.
Polygraphs aren't "baseless pseudoscience"
They're "Extremely unreliable devices based on a mixture of pseudoscientific assumptions and real biometrics". And the CIA isn't a court of law. They're aren't interested in finding the truth beyond a reasonable doubt. They're interested in pressuring you to tell them everything you can.
First question (Score:5, Insightful)
"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States..."
Whoopsie, wrong questionnaire.
Re:Brought to you by the same people (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a murky field. A polygraph does present useful information; it's just not necessarily whether the person is telling the truth. The major decision part of any polygraph system is the operator, and they need to have sp,e training in physical psychology to be predictably any good at using the equipment.
Seems to me that this new system falls into the same category. They'll be able to get some new data that would have been obscured before, but the interpretation of the data will still require an expert.
Personally, I think this is better than leaving it up to a human, as the human mind has known defects during the data acquisition phase -- these systems don't have those weaknesses, and while they can't draw any conclusions, they gather a different (and in some cases more complete) set of information than a human by themselves would gather.
The problem comes when people conflate the results of the tests with factual certainty -- both systems require interpretation, and as we all know, statistics lie 99.8% of the time.