|
The body politic needs a high colonic, and Michael Masley has imagined before the rest of the world how to bring it about: Software that scans talking-head video clips for unconscious betrayal of lies, and then morphs the subject's proboscis, Pinocchio-like, as the falsehoods pile up. Disingenuous White House press secretaries would quickly come to resemble Jimmy Durante, public servants intent on covering their tracks would become dead ringers for Cyrano de Bergerac. It's a prescient vision. In fact, the components of a digital-age polygraph already exist. Laptop voice-stress analyzers are in common use in police departments and government agencies. Israeli pattern-recognition algorithms can track changes in muscle tone and skin color captured on even low-res video - all the more effectively with high-definition television - and apply Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to describe muscular activity in the face. Natural language processors like the TellMe voice portal (to converse with it, call your favorite airline-reservation service) parse speech into words. Meanwhile, a growing body of research identifies aural, visual, and verbal signs of deception, correlations between them making for high-res lie detection. Not to mention the growing archive of digital video available on the World Wide Web, which captures public figures in situations both tense and (crucial for calibration) relaxed. The gleefully imagined morphing nose is decade-old icing on the cake, available today in real time, thanks to Moore's Law. All that's left is for some enterprising patriot/coder - or open-source collective - to hammer the pieces into a downloadable expert system designed to let any mook with a Net connection catch public liars in the act. LieJinx is the epitome of Victor Hugo's "idea whose time has come." Its impact - when it happens - could be nothing less than the revitalization of democracy. Ted Greenwald |