I admit: I skipped the last part of the article, so maybe I'm missing something, but... Why wouldn't he rather invent something better, knowing how old stuff is shit? Or encourage others to invent something better? Saying "it's broken" is easy. Breaking it further, while more difficult, is easy as well. Now, fixing or replacing it...
Making a lie detector is no easy task. And there is no gurantee that it'll work. Or that it wont be misused.
All of it applies to any new or improved technology. Still, we are able to communicate using plastic keys which, when pressed, push an electrical signal to a complex board of circuits of various complexity of their own, which encode it into a special code which gets transported again onto a vast array of microdiods which allows us to watch cinematographic pictures that are so complex and bizarre in their advancement... I feel like I've made my point.
So my question - not to you specifically, but to anyone who can answer - remains: why not make something better instead?
What I took away from this is determining whether or not someone is lying based on a series of questions while testing heart-rate, sweat, etc. etc. is fundamentally broken. The protagonist of the story chose to showcase it's flaws by showing it is easy to pass with proper training. He could have also shown how easy to fail due to any number of circumstances (like the stress of taking the test), but it is unlikely he would have garnered the attention he did.
It wasn't mentioned in this article, but it seemed like one major benefit of the training sessions is the fact that you know what you are getting into. I am generally an anxious person and that training and practice alone would alleviate a ton of my fears, regardless if I were lying or intended to lie. Knowing exactly what was going to happen when I walked into the room (ie: I'll be hooked up to this thing and that thing and asked a question like this) would be amazing for my anxiety. Would my anxiety surrounding the test affect the results the test gave? I know they do control questions but still...
I recently read an article that police are testing these big glasses thingies that are going to take your eyes and pupils and spit out what drugs you are on. The basis is pretty obvious: opiates typically restrict your pupils while amphetamines typically expand them. If we measure what happens to people under the influence of drugs and then compare then to users suspected of being on drugs, we could hypothetically determine what drug a random driver is on, right? The one very massive problem with this is the control sample. Using my eyes as a control to random girl 1000 miles away is bonkers and not a control. Using my eyes not on drugs as a control for my eyes on drugs would be better, but it is impossible to give people you pull over and suspect are on drugs. The other massive problem is there are any number of circumstances that would cause your pupils to constrict or expand and my eyes my not react the same way to those circumstances as yours, nor may my eyes react to drugs in the same way as yours.
Basically, just because we have the technology that allows us to do certain things, doesn't mean that every human body reacts in the same way to the same set of circumstances. It's dangerous to make assumptions or to develop technologies that supposedly give you a magic answer.
It's a good point.
What I don't understand is - if the guy's point is to show how broken is the machine, why not make it as public as he could without revealing his identity or endangering his life? I can only assume that he believes that, by making more and more people capable of breaking the process, he'd show how broken the process already is. Fine, but - how many people will he train in his lifetime? 50? 100? 1000? 10000, if he loses sleep and stops living his own life? Even then, unless he trains convicted criminals, most people won't notice or will notice too late to correlate passing the "detector" and the undesirable behavior at the workplace.
What he does seems futile to me. Even ten thousand people is less than one percent of the US' population, and I doubt he can train more. Spending his time on neurological scanners might have been a better spending of his time if he saw torturing people as bad way to extract the truth - and that's just the way the uneducated me can think of it.
Because maybe you feel people have i right to lie? Maybe you feel lying is a privacy issue - that any technology that effortlessly tells when someone is lying is to easy to misuse.
After all - if the goverment/your employer/journalists/private investigators etc can tell you are lying they will always know everything. And maybe you think thats wrong.
So you don't want that kind of technology to exist.
And thus you don't want something "better".
Because you can't trust people to only use it for important questions.