- Published in:
- Cosmos Magazine
- Publication date:
- 18th Sept 2008
Full text available at Cosmos Magazine.
What kind of super power would you like? Incredible strength? Invisibility? The ability to know, infallibly, if someone was being deceitful? You may be surprised to learn that the latter is already within your reach (and, incidentally, scientists have made crucial steps in making the former two much closer to reality).
Imagine, no more having to second-guess your boss about your forthcoming raise, or your other half about their whereabouts last night. Would that be heaven or hell?
Paul Ekman, during his research into whether human facial expressions were universal or culturally relativistic (the former), discovered a side to the face (no pun, intended!) that hadn’t been noticed before: fleeting expressions that reveal a subject’s true emotional reaction to an event/statement before their conscious control takes over.
With much practice, these “microexpressions” can be identified in realtime–Malcolm Gladwell, in his New Yorker article “The Naked Face” gives a striking example of this (and much more besides)–hence the possibility of lie-detection.
To me, this revelation felt like dynamite for a story. A genuine “superpower” that was within the grasp of modern technology. How would it be used? It wasn’t much of a leap to assume that interrogations would be one of the first places–the military/police forces have the funding and the motivation. Combining this with the idea of machine sentience and I was ready to go.