Amit Katwala
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Trump calls Zelensky a 'dictator'
It's not just a faster version of our current computers. It's a fundamentally different device that basically takes advantage of some weird properties of quantum physics to do things that current computers can't do. So instead of using bits, which are ones and zeros, like a normal computer, a quantum computer uses what are called qubits.
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Trump calls Zelensky a 'dictator'
So these can be one, zero, or somewhere in between, a state called superposition. Now that's quite complicated. I like to think of it in terms of flipping a coin. So if a normal computer could be heads or tails, a quantum computer can be heads, tails, or also a spinning coin where you don't know quite where it's going to land.
Global News Podcast
Trump calls Zelensky a 'dictator'
It means it's going to be much better at simulating the natural world, which also follows those rules, right? The natural world does not follow the rules of ones and zeros. It follows these kind of quantum rules. physics rules.
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Trump calls Zelensky a 'dictator'
So if we can build a computer that simulates those quantum physics rules, then we're going to be much better at simulating biology, chemistry, physics, you know, designing new medicines, finding materials for better batteries, things like that.
Global News Podcast
Trump calls Zelensky a 'dictator'
So Microsoft have been trying to do this for almost 20 years, and they've really embarked on a very different approach to the other companies in the field that are doing this, you know, Google, Amazon, etc, IBM. And this was really like a kind of Hail Mary play.
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Trump calls Zelensky a 'dictator'
Like when they started doing this, it was really like, no one was really sure if it would actually work or not, if it was even a real thing. So some experts are sceptical as to whether the claims that Microsoft have made are actually going to come to fruition. But certainly they've made a big splash.
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That's the principle or the theory, and we'll get into why that maybe isn't necessarily true later on, I'm sure. But yes, the theory is that if you are doing a polygraph exam, you are going to be scared about getting caught.
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So when you get asked a question that you know you're going to have to lie on, your pulse will start going up, your blood pressure will go up, you might start breathing differently.
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And a skilled polygraph examiner, so the theory goes, should be able to tell the difference between someone who's lying and someone who's telling the truth based on how those things change when they're asked the question.
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It depends on the scenario. I think a lot of government jobs in the US still require a polygraph exam. So certain military roles, certain police roles. So some people don't have a choice. That was much more rampant until the late kind of 80s when it was outlawed in commercial enterprises.
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But there was a brief period when even companies like McDonald's were doing polygraph tests on their potential employees. For criminal cases, you know, I think sometimes it's presented as a waste for people to clear their name. So I can see why if you are innocent, you might be tempted by that. And maybe if you're guilty, you sort of think, well, you know, I can maybe get away with it.
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Exactly. That's a really big kind of flaw in the polygraph. And actually, the polygraph was one of the devices that established the set of standards that we now use to determine whether something is admissible in court or not. It was one of the real test cases where they actually looked at it and they thought, hang on, maybe this isn't really science.
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The polygraph machine specifically, which is, I guess, what most people think of now when they think of a lie detector, has its origins in Berkeley, California in the 1920s with the Berkeley Police Department, and a police officer called John Larson. John Larson was a physiologist by training. He wanted to become a criminologist, which is a very new field at that time.
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And he took a job in Berkeley because the Berkeley Police Department was led by a kind of visionary police chief called August Vollmer. Vollmer was one of the first...
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police chiefs in america to try and bring science or evidence to policing so he gave his officers bikes because he kind of thought that that would enable them to cover more ground he gave them radios he started doing crime mapping and all this kind of pioneering stuff
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And as part of that, he also started to hire college graduates as police officers, which was a real revolutionary step at the time in the kind of 1910s, 1920s. So John Marston was one of these college cops, and he and Vollmer came across this paper by a guy called William Marston.
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He was a psychologist at Harvard University, and he noticed that when he asked his peers to tell untrue stories, their blood pressure went up. So Larson thought, well, okay, that's an interesting insight, but how can I systematize that? How can I turn that into something objective that can be measured and where the measurements can be recorded so that they can be referred back to you later?
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And it's that insight, you know, how can you take this thing that we think we've identified where blood pressure goes up when people lie, how can we turn that into a machine that is objective rather than just based on a single person's observations? So those are the real seeds of the polygraph.
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looking at like dormitory thefts at the University of Berkeley. So that was the first case of the polygraph. There was a women's only dorm in Berkeley and a bunch of stuff had gone missing like jewelry and cash and books and things like that. And this was the first case where the Berkeley police department were kind of called in to run polygraph tests on all these young women.
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To try and find out who did it. And so John Larson went along with the machine and he ran tests on all these women, including the woman whose stuff had been stolen to begin with. And, you know, eventually he came across a woman who blew up when the machine was connected to her, refused to answer any more questions. And he kind of thought, well, she's the one who did it.
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The most recent estimates I have suggest that there are about 3 million lie detector tests a year in the United States. It's used much more heavily in some countries than others. So the US is a very, very heavy user of the polygraph. Japan is another one. So, yes, it was used and it is used. It's still used by government departments, you know, intelligence agencies and things like that.
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But it's also used by police departments where they want to get a confession from someone. without necessarily having to take a case to trial. It's a much cheaper way of extracting a confession from someone if you think they're guilty than having to go through this sort of expense and process of actually taking them to trial. So it is still used quite widely.
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And you see this in kind of true crime documentaries all the time where the polygraph invariably pops up at some point in the investigation. Its heyday was really in the kind of 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, I think. So after Larson did these tests on women in college dorms, then they quickly started testing suspected murderers.
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And then it kind of snowballed from there with the help of a guy called Leonard Keeler, who was a high school student who really helped to popularize the machine.
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Yeah, so the estimates range from as high as 85 to 90 percent to as low as 60 to 65 percent. So it's not much better than tossing a coin. And studies show that actually, as individuals, we can get it. We can tell when someone's lying about 54 percent of the time. So it's only slightly better than just human intuition.
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And I guess this comes to the second point, which is it's not really possible to actually assess how accurate the polygraph is when it comes to criminal investigations, because you never actually know what really happened. Say someone gets found guilty with the polygraph, then gets found guilty by a jury and gets sent to prison. That doesn't necessarily mean they were guilty.
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So you can never really know. All you can really tell is that in this case, the polygraph agreed with the jury. In this case, the polygraph didn't agree with the jury. But juries are fallible as well. So you can never really tell how accurate the polygraph actually is in the real world rather than lab studies.
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Perhaps the easiest way to visualize this is by talking through the equipment that you have attached to you when you have a polygraph test done. So the first thing that you will notice is there's a blood pressure cuff wrapped around your arm. So that's measuring your pulse and also your blood pressure. So how fast your heart is beating and what your blood pressure is doing at the same time.
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Then the second thing you'll have is you have two bands wrapped around your chest, one to measure your breathing around the kind of higher up your chest and then one around your diaphragm for lower down. And those are measuring your breathing rate.
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So how fast you're taking an air and it's thought that liars might hold their breath while they're formulating a response to a question that they know they're going to have to lie on or things like that. And then the final thing is called galvanic skin response, which is basically sweat. So this is usually attached to the fingertip and this measures how much you're sweating.
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So each of those measurements will have a corresponding line on the polygraph chart. And then the examiners will learn to interpret those lines in tandem to look for kind of signs of what they consider to be lying.
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Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So and actually, the technology hasn't changed since, you know, the 1920s, really. So in the initial one, yeah, you'd have four different lines on the chart. And then it's the kind of combination of those lines that will appear on the chart, you know, ink on paper or nowadays it's on a computer screen.
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Exactly. The machine is supposed to work on the premise that liars will be nervous, but people are nervous for all sorts of reasons, right? There's no way of telling whether someone is sweaty because they're lying or sweaty because they're nervous about being wrongly accused of lying.
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Or maybe they're lying, yeah. But you just can't tell. And that's the big problem with the polygraph. Even if 90% of people would show a particular result on the polygraph, that doesn't mean it's true for everyone. And that's the big problem. There's no single telltale sign of lying that works for everyone all of the time. Researchers in the field say there's no Pinocchio's nose.
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You know, there's nothing that is going to give you the right answer with enough certainty, enough times to be valid to use in a courtroom setting, for instance.
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So it's actually been barred from the courtroom for a really, really long time. So Larson invented the machine in 1921. And there was a famous case called the Fry case, which was set a precedent that the polygraph couldn't be used in the courtroom. And that was actually in, I think, 1923. So it really wasn't long afterwards.
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But even the people that invented the polygraph kind of had their misgivings about it quite early on. and thought that it shouldn't have been used as widely as it was being used even back then. So John Larson, who invented it, was really excited about it for the first couple of years. But then he saw how his scientific caution kind of got blown away by hype and press coverage.
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And then by the end of his life, he hated the machine. He thought it was like a Frankenstein's monster that he'd unleashed on the world. So I would say that within 10 years, there were serious doubts about the efficacy of the polygraph. But by then, the hype and the you know, the drama around it sort of overtook it all and it really snowballed.
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It's very, very subjective. So, yes, you can give two different examiners the same chart to examine and they could come up with completely different answers as to whether the person was lying.
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Yes, essentially. That would be my contention. I mean, I think that the machine has obviously helped to put criminals away. There's no getting around that. But the problem is that it's also perpetrated serious miscarriages of justice. Essentially, the reason the polygraph has been so successful is because of the theatre around it, right?
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It works because people believe it works so that the mere threat of being attached to a polygraph can compel someone to confess to the crime before the exam even takes place because they're so worried about being found out because they believe the machine works even if it doesn't actually work.
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I mean, you don't even need a polygraph machine some of the time. So there's a great story from David Simon's book about policing in Baltimore where he describes the situation. And I think it's recreated in an episode of The Wire, actually, where the police officers didn't have a polygraph available. So they used a Xerox machine.
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And they put the subject's hand on a Xerox machine and told the subject that it was a lie detector and then just got the machine to print out a piece of paper with he's lying written on it. And that was enough to kind of trick the suspect into actually, you know, believing that the machine could read their mind.
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Exactly. Yes, it does the job. It's all about the theater of it. And actually, they realized this very early on, the inventors of the polygraph, that it was largely about the theater. So they did take steps to amp that up.
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Yes. So to train to become a polygraph examiner, well, there's no real regulation stopping you from just buying a polygraph machine on eBay and then advertising your services. But most polygraph examiners that are operating today have certification from something called the American Polygraph Association.
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However, in order to get certification from the American Polygraph Association requires a 12 week course, I think it is. So we're talking about a few thousand dollars, a few months, and then that's it.
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Those ways of... I don't know if there's ever been kind of a direct comparison done with the same subjects, but a lot of other methods of detecting lies have been very thoroughly tested, but they all suffer from the same sort of fatal flaw, which is you can't be sure. And with something like lie detection, you kind of need to be sure, right?
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If you are running someone in a murder case where the crime is capital punishment, then you need to be 100% sure that... they are going to be susceptible to the particular type of lie detector you're trying to use on them. And there's no evidence to suggest that everyone will display exactly the same range of physiological responses to telling a lie.
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And actually, you might expect that a psychopath or a serial killer might not actually show the range of emotional responses that you would expect. So maybe those people are actually less susceptible to lie detectors than your ordinary man on the street because they already have... a kind of different range of emotional responses. And actually, that's what we're looking for with the polygraph.
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Yeah, I think it's used because it's convenient. So if you can get a confession from someone using the polygraph, that's much cheaper than... having to go out and collect all the evidence and then take the case to court and all that kind of stuff. It is slowly being superseded by different forms of lie detection in some fields.
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I think there's kind of new inventions that are cheaper to run than the polygraph that don't require a trained examiner and all this kind of stuff. So we might see it shifting away from the polygraph towards new forms of lie detection in the future, but it's convenient. People believe it works and, you know, it gets results easily.
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Actually, a lot of the time it gets the results that the people running the test are looking for. Whether it actually gets to the truth is a kind of different question.
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That's right. The way it's portrayed in film and TV is quite wrong, actually, because it's kind of portrayed as this back and forth between the investigator and the suspect. But yes, actually, the way that the test was originally designed was, yeah, these very, very slow...
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yes or no questions repeated multiple times over the course of several hours the suspect gives yes yes or no responses because the the point is you want to minimize the difference between the control questions which are irrelevant to the crime and the target questions which are about the crime so you want to you want the suspect to be sitting as still as possible to reduce interference so you don't want them to be spinning out long sentences and things like that you want to
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keep the differences to a minimum so that when they do lie, it shows up on the chart. Or at least that's the theory anyway.
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Yeah, that's right. It's just somehow become sort of embedded in the justice system. And I think a lot of people have debunked it. It's been debunked by numerous academic studies, government reports, expert analysis on several occasions, but it just sort of refuses to go away. And I think that's probably something to do with human nature, right?
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drawn to this idea that a machine can reveal the truth, right? Especially in a time when truth is so difficult to find. I think this idea that there is a machine that can do it for us is still quite compelling.
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I appreciate it.
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And does it work? Essentially, the reason the polygraph has been so successful is because of the theater around it, right? It works because people believe it works, so that the mere threat of being attached to a polygraph can compel someone to confess to the crime before the exam even takes place. All this today on Something You Should Know.