ROBOT SAYS YOU ARE THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY. YOU WILL NOW DIE PLEASE.

ITEM: Psychologists at the National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA) are developing an interview system that uses a responsive on-screen avatar for the first stage of the national security clearance process.

Put another way: in future, people applying for government jobs requiring national security clearance will be interviewed by robots.

Motherboard explains:

Initial screening for a variety of government jobs currently requires applicants to fill out a form disclosing past drug use, criminal activity, and mental health issues, which is then reviewed during an interview—with a human.

But a recent NCCA study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior asserts that not only would a computer-generated interviewer be less “time consuming, labor intensive, and costly to the Federal Government,” people are actually more likely to admit things to the robot.

Obviously the bot doesn’t get the final say on whether yr cleared. And it’s not an AI program so much as something similar to those computers some companies use for telephone customer service.

But I’m intrigued by the idea that yr more likely to be candid about yr past history if you talk to a machine.

Especially a machine that “is racially ambiguous and looks like a sort of cross between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.”

Observe:



You just want to pour yr heart out to it, don't you?

Dashboard confessional,

This is dF