I am not a Robot

[InCognitus]

Just in case anyone is wondering, I am not a robot

Those "click all the squares..." things are really annoying, but I accept them with open arms if it keeps this board secure and open for new users.

[Pyreaux]

But, if you were a robot, would you honestly tell us?

[Calm]

9 minutes ago, Pyreaux said:

But, if you were a robot, would you honestly tell us?

Is the concept of honesty even relevant to a robot?

I second the welcome appearance of the gatekeeper given I was getting blocked out again yesterday way too much. 

Edited February 10 by Calm

[Pyreaux]

14 minutes ago, Calm said:

Is the concept of honesty even relevant to a robot?

If you were a robot, are you so certain you would know it?

[JVW]

I am also happy that there is a bot protector on the site. Hopefully we can start seeing new members again. I refer people I chat with to this forum from time to time and hope some of them will be interested in signing up.

Every time I see a captcha I'm now reminded of this article: https://substack.com/@thedreydossier/p-184044880

Quote

In 2016, oil prices crashed and Venezuela’s economy collapsed overnight. Then Washington piled on sanctions, cutting Caracas off from U.S. financial markets, blocking the state oil company from getting paid, freezing billions in assets, and choking off critical imports. By 2018, annual inflation hit over 1,000,000 percent, with the monthly minimum wage dropping to about $30. Engineers, teachers, and nurses with advanced degrees couldn’t afford a week’s groceries on their formal salaries.

So what happens when you create mass desperation in a country full of educated people who suddenly can’t afford to eat? Someone shows up to harvest it.

Enter the ghost work platforms: Scale AI, Appen, Remotasks, Toloka. Cheerful interfaces promising to help people “earn in your spare time,” sitting on top of contracts with OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Google. The AI systems being built by the richest companies on the planet need hundreds of millions of tiny human decisions to function, and someone has to provide them. Someone has to label images so algorithms learn what a stop sign looks like, tag videos so AI can recognize faces and weapons, sort text so machine learning models understand what counts as “hate” or “terrorism.”

By mid-2018, around 200,000 Venezuelans had signed up for this work at rates between 50 cents and $2 an hour. In a collapsed economy, that was ten times the minimum wage, which made it survival, not choice.

A teacher named Oskarina Fuentes left Venezuela for Colombia because she couldn’t feed her kids. Now she spends her nights labeling images—give the box a tick if this is a car, draw a rectangle around the person crossing the street, choose which comment is more “toxic.” Half a dollar an hour to teach AI owned by American companies how to see the world.

In 2019, Scale AI rolled out Spanish-language recruitment ads and launched “Remotasks Plus,” pitched as a way to help Venezuelans “get through the crisis.” Workers described delayed payments, platforms that crashed and then punished them for incomplete jobs, and zero labor protections. In industry reports, Venezuelans became known as some of the lowest-paid data workers on earth, not because they lacked skills, but because they had no leverage.

I'm like Santa Claus, bringing cheer into every thread I participate in.

[The Nehor]

I might be a robot dreaming it is a human. It would explain a lot really.

[Tony uk]

Although, for some it maybe a annoying security feature. If it helps prevent a similar issue to last year, when the board was being hit a little. 

 Sometimes, a little security measure, can be of help in the long run 

Edited February 10 by Tony uk
Spelling mistake

[Devobah]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

I might be a robot dreaming it is a human. It would explain a lot really.

Don't robots dream of electric sheep and electric sheep only?

[InCognitus]

3 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

But, if you were a robot, would you honestly tell us?

If I was a robot, I wouldn't be here (theoretically) because I wouldn't be able to click the correct boxes.

But it will be interesting to see how many users can no longer post here, and we can just assume by their lack of posting that those users are all robots!  (Wait, no, I think that's robot logic).

[The Nehor]

10 hours ago, Devobah said:

Don't robots dream of electric sheep and electric sheep only?

Yes, that is why it makes sense. Everyone I have met in my life has been an electric sheep dressed in a human suit. Many of the human suits were pretty shoddily constructed too.

[InCognitus]

I've been wondering if the new robot filters will keep the Calvinists off the board.  I suppose they could be predestined to click the right boxes, so maybe it wouldn't be 100% effective.