On the lie detector part, my view on this (as a person loosely qualified to have opinions on this lol) is that I think we will have transformative changes to society long before we have technology like what is imagined about lie detectors. Specifically, I think there are assumptions about how the mind works which make it seem like this is a more attainable invention than it would be. For example:
- The idea that the mind contains a single running monologue that matches the output of a person's speech, and to find out if they are "really lying" all you need to do is check if their inner mental monologue matches their speech output.
- The idea that statements that a person would agree to are all stored in a person's mind somewhere.
- The idea that the mind contains a list of facts about the world with assigned strengths of beliefs a la "Tractatus" Wittgenstein.
I think the vision of a lie detector is that you could extract these kinds of linguistic information from a person's mind. But I don't think the mind is structured in the sort of linguistic way that would allow this. I think the mind is structured more as a loose mess of associations (A brings up B brings up C), and the linguistic output we observe is a sort of chaotic Rube Goldberg type construction on top of this mess of associations which makes it look like the mind makes way more sense than it does. Similar to "Philosophical Investigations" era Wittgenstein, I think there are many "beliefs" that people would agree to if prompted by someone that are not actually stored anywhere in the mind. They are "just in time compiled" let's say, when someone asks you the question or solicits the behavior.
I think something approximating the imagined lie detector technology might someday exist, but I think our society is likely to look fundamentally completely different by that point.
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As to the part about the role of scholar-official intellectual elite types in our short term future society, I think that's a pretty interesting question and close to my heart lol. I think there is probably some sort of symbiotic relationship where the intellectuals either arguing for or against the System as it is justify it. I've been reading some books about Asian history lately, and it brings to mind this thought I had while reading about the importing of Chinese ideologies into Nara/Heian era Japan, how they kind of imported all these ideologies at once--both the ones that prop up the system (Confucianism) and the ones that claim to surpass and transcend the system (Buddhism, Taoism), which really served to prop up the system at a different level. The idea that came to my mind was that this combination of ideologies and counter ideologies was probably even more potent in perpetuating the hierarchy/social order than a single ideology would be. But anyways, maybe the elite will keep us around to justify their existence even if we do it just by arguing against the system lol.
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I guess the other general strand of wondering how the future would be in the long term is the possibility that our AI descendants just kind of live their best life and treats us the way we treat apes or other animals--either ignoring them, or putting them in like an enriched environment that meets their psychological needs while being totally artificial.
I'm not sure that the following is likely to be true.
">There would be few false convictions and a much higher conviction rate for criminals (even if criminals have a first amendment right to refuse the truth machine, their witnesses testimony will be more readily believed). The flow on effects for how people view the criminal justice system is hard to know. On one hand, people might feel safer and more certain wrongdoers would be punished. This could lead to a more merciful justice system. On the other hand, with uncertainty banished from the criminal justice process, the vengeful might feel like one of the few important reasons to “spare the rod” was gone, and they could indulge their vengeful desires without concern that the convicted might be innocent."
That testimonies are more likely to be believed is certainly true. But it doesn't then follow that the convictions gravitate towards their 'correct' rate, simply because testimonies may not themselves be correct. As another commenter suggests, highly confident delusions would pass a lie-detector test, which is on the more extreme end of confident falsehoods. On the less extreme end is eyewitness testimony. We know that eyewitness testimony is riddled with non-trivial errors and falsities. A working lie-detector might eliminate a propensity to mislead or deceive on the stand, but it wouldn't eliminate confident beliefs in untruths.
As a result, juries might be more likely to agree with eyewitness testimonies even when they are wrong, which could push the false conviction rate upwards.
But if the accused gets up there and says "I didn't do [what you are accusing me of]", and maintains that under questioning ***and we know they're not lying***, that seems like it would be pretty persuasive.
Yet that goes both ways, right? An example drawn from a recent Twitter sighting: police officers are taught to shout "Stop resisting / put down the weapon" after shooting because eyewitnesses invert the order of events to make a sensible narrative. This kind of material fact might be a critical issue in deciding the culpability of some individual.
Now, in this case, the cops would get caught out on the stand. But the point here is to illustrate how a single fact can be subject to doubt based only on testimony, even if we know there is no deception. This is important because not all criminal offences involve a single discrete act (e.g. an act of shoplifting), but some involve a chain of events that may or may not be an offence, depending on the relevant facts.
Thus, asserting merely that "I didn't do [what you are accusing me of]" is not sufficient to elaborate those facts, which are the material that juries are asked to deliberate upon. (Indeed, making that assertion is tantamount to repeating "I am innocent," which from a legal POV is an evaluative statement about the facts.) Instead, the accused must make a truth-claim about each salient fact, any of which might be subject to equal contest from other equally confident witnesses. But I suspect that the accused are often poor guides to the facts of their own circumstances, especially where emotions are high, such that other testimonies from less partial observers might be more confident, even if they are no more likely to be true.
I do worry that the invention of a reliable lie detector would end up primarily benefitting the delusional, who believe what they're saying with far more confidence than anyone sane ever could. Unsure if rewarding certainty and punishing uncertainty would actually be much of an improvement, it would depend on how much of the world's problems you attribute to malice vs ignorance.
Unsure how it would affect prison - as I've said before, I think most people (regardless of politics) have a strong desire for people who "deserve it" to suffer, so increased confidence could be a bad thing.
I am increasingly concerned about both AI alignment (it does seem that training AI to do what you want is far harder than training it to do what it's told) and the effects on society regarding the distribution of power and resources. If I extrapolate current trends forwards into the future, I imagine a society in which a small elite are the primary beneficiaries of a technology they neither understand nor fully control. It does depend on exactly how pessimistic you are, I would point to philanthropy to suggest that the wealthy do care a lot about how they are perceived, ruling out the most dystopian options. However, I can certainly imagine them desiring to firmly establish themselves and their descendants as a permanent class above everyone else. As a social democrat I'd hope for a more equitable distribution of power and resources than that - I'm fine with the owners of capital getting to enjoy vast abundance a bit before the rest of us, but definitely not with some eternal neo-feudalism!
Interesting thoughts!
On the lie detector part, my view on this (as a person loosely qualified to have opinions on this lol) is that I think we will have transformative changes to society long before we have technology like what is imagined about lie detectors. Specifically, I think there are assumptions about how the mind works which make it seem like this is a more attainable invention than it would be. For example:
- The idea that the mind contains a single running monologue that matches the output of a person's speech, and to find out if they are "really lying" all you need to do is check if their inner mental monologue matches their speech output.
- The idea that statements that a person would agree to are all stored in a person's mind somewhere.
- The idea that the mind contains a list of facts about the world with assigned strengths of beliefs a la "Tractatus" Wittgenstein.
I think the vision of a lie detector is that you could extract these kinds of linguistic information from a person's mind. But I don't think the mind is structured in the sort of linguistic way that would allow this. I think the mind is structured more as a loose mess of associations (A brings up B brings up C), and the linguistic output we observe is a sort of chaotic Rube Goldberg type construction on top of this mess of associations which makes it look like the mind makes way more sense than it does. Similar to "Philosophical Investigations" era Wittgenstein, I think there are many "beliefs" that people would agree to if prompted by someone that are not actually stored anywhere in the mind. They are "just in time compiled" let's say, when someone asks you the question or solicits the behavior.
I think something approximating the imagined lie detector technology might someday exist, but I think our society is likely to look fundamentally completely different by that point.
__
As to the part about the role of scholar-official intellectual elite types in our short term future society, I think that's a pretty interesting question and close to my heart lol. I think there is probably some sort of symbiotic relationship where the intellectuals either arguing for or against the System as it is justify it. I've been reading some books about Asian history lately, and it brings to mind this thought I had while reading about the importing of Chinese ideologies into Nara/Heian era Japan, how they kind of imported all these ideologies at once--both the ones that prop up the system (Confucianism) and the ones that claim to surpass and transcend the system (Buddhism, Taoism), which really served to prop up the system at a different level. The idea that came to my mind was that this combination of ideologies and counter ideologies was probably even more potent in perpetuating the hierarchy/social order than a single ideology would be. But anyways, maybe the elite will keep us around to justify their existence even if we do it just by arguing against the system lol.
__
I guess the other general strand of wondering how the future would be in the long term is the possibility that our AI descendants just kind of live their best life and treats us the way we treat apes or other animals--either ignoring them, or putting them in like an enriched environment that meets their psychological needs while being totally artificial.
Thanks for writing!
I'm not sure that the following is likely to be true.
">There would be few false convictions and a much higher conviction rate for criminals (even if criminals have a first amendment right to refuse the truth machine, their witnesses testimony will be more readily believed). The flow on effects for how people view the criminal justice system is hard to know. On one hand, people might feel safer and more certain wrongdoers would be punished. This could lead to a more merciful justice system. On the other hand, with uncertainty banished from the criminal justice process, the vengeful might feel like one of the few important reasons to “spare the rod” was gone, and they could indulge their vengeful desires without concern that the convicted might be innocent."
That testimonies are more likely to be believed is certainly true. But it doesn't then follow that the convictions gravitate towards their 'correct' rate, simply because testimonies may not themselves be correct. As another commenter suggests, highly confident delusions would pass a lie-detector test, which is on the more extreme end of confident falsehoods. On the less extreme end is eyewitness testimony. We know that eyewitness testimony is riddled with non-trivial errors and falsities. A working lie-detector might eliminate a propensity to mislead or deceive on the stand, but it wouldn't eliminate confident beliefs in untruths.
As a result, juries might be more likely to agree with eyewitness testimonies even when they are wrong, which could push the false conviction rate upwards.
But if the accused gets up there and says "I didn't do [what you are accusing me of]", and maintains that under questioning ***and we know they're not lying***, that seems like it would be pretty persuasive.
Yet that goes both ways, right? An example drawn from a recent Twitter sighting: police officers are taught to shout "Stop resisting / put down the weapon" after shooting because eyewitnesses invert the order of events to make a sensible narrative. This kind of material fact might be a critical issue in deciding the culpability of some individual.
Now, in this case, the cops would get caught out on the stand. But the point here is to illustrate how a single fact can be subject to doubt based only on testimony, even if we know there is no deception. This is important because not all criminal offences involve a single discrete act (e.g. an act of shoplifting), but some involve a chain of events that may or may not be an offence, depending on the relevant facts.
Thus, asserting merely that "I didn't do [what you are accusing me of]" is not sufficient to elaborate those facts, which are the material that juries are asked to deliberate upon. (Indeed, making that assertion is tantamount to repeating "I am innocent," which from a legal POV is an evaluative statement about the facts.) Instead, the accused must make a truth-claim about each salient fact, any of which might be subject to equal contest from other equally confident witnesses. But I suspect that the accused are often poor guides to the facts of their own circumstances, especially where emotions are high, such that other testimonies from less partial observers might be more confident, even if they are no more likely to be true.
"Strictly speaking, these claims might not be contradictory, but there sure is tension between them."
Not at all. This is "AI safety":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM
Regardless, AI today is quite useful at content moderation. Try playing around with the Discord content filter for images.
Though less impressive, Google Translate is probably the most useful example of AI people regularly use -at least, I use it all the time.
I do worry that the invention of a reliable lie detector would end up primarily benefitting the delusional, who believe what they're saying with far more confidence than anyone sane ever could. Unsure if rewarding certainty and punishing uncertainty would actually be much of an improvement, it would depend on how much of the world's problems you attribute to malice vs ignorance.
Unsure how it would affect prison - as I've said before, I think most people (regardless of politics) have a strong desire for people who "deserve it" to suffer, so increased confidence could be a bad thing.
I am increasingly concerned about both AI alignment (it does seem that training AI to do what you want is far harder than training it to do what it's told) and the effects on society regarding the distribution of power and resources. If I extrapolate current trends forwards into the future, I imagine a society in which a small elite are the primary beneficiaries of a technology they neither understand nor fully control. It does depend on exactly how pessimistic you are, I would point to philanthropy to suggest that the wealthy do care a lot about how they are perceived, ruling out the most dystopian options. However, I can certainly imagine them desiring to firmly establish themselves and their descendants as a permanent class above everyone else. As a social democrat I'd hope for a more equitable distribution of power and resources than that - I'm fine with the owners of capital getting to enjoy vast abundance a bit before the rest of us, but definitely not with some eternal neo-feudalism!