
Dealership Makes Woman Sitting Right in Front of Them Confirm She's Not a Robot - edward
https://jalopnik.com/dealership-makes-woman-sitting-right-in-front-of-them-c-1826232532
======
ggg9990
I am not going to say that this is a bad thing. One thing about managing a
widely distributed company, with workers of various skill levels, is creating
crystal clear rules. The rule that “everything you fill in online MUST be an
exact replica of a customer’s handwritten input, and anything else is a
fireable offense” you avoid people trying to say “well she said she wanted the
$500 paint upgrade even though she didn’t write it down.”

~~~
slx26
pros:

\- crystal clear rules

\- the laughs

cons:

\- people not thinking about what are they doing

\- customers going like: do they even know what are they doing?

that first con outweights by a large, large margin any pros I could come up
with

~~~
seangrant
The point of the crystal clear rules is to reduce how much the human operator
needs to think about what they're doing. Should you teach your workers every
legal nuance they need to sell a car (and hope they follow them), or do you
setup clearly defined rules that can be easily followed and repeated?

------
crypto-jeronimo
Next thing you know, they show you a paper photo and ask you to identify cars,
bridges and whatnot in it ...

~~~
Spare_account
The possibility exists that the online version of the form _would_ be
presented with that challenge, but the paper version was printed when the
simple checkbox option was presented (I'm asssuming they bulk print blank
forms ahead of time).

So then the principle that "every action on the web form is matched by the
customer's ink marks on paper" would be invalid. They'd have to print that
exact iteration of the Captcha and have the customer do exactly that.

~~~
crypto-jeronimo
Yes, but that's literally impossible.

Unless, they: (i) can predict the future; (ii) invent a time machine, which
may a superset of (i), subject to the associated limitations of the "device";
(iii) break Google's algorithm in a way that they could know in advance which
customer would be served which (Re)CAPTCHA at _exactly_ which point in time.

The latest point would be extremely challenging even if they were printing a
(Re)CAPTCHA in real time, during the process of filling the physical form.

> the principle that "every action on the web form is matched by the
> customer's ink marks on paper"

I think some of this would also be impossible, because the web form does not
exist in isolation and is part of a particular browser environment: \- browser
version \- installed plug-ins \- associated plug-in settings \- auto-fill
suggestions

Then, one goes down the rabbit hole of other un-matchable features such as,
peculiarities of the underlying OS. For instance, in the context of Windows
10, a user may get an additional dose of distraction due to receiving utterly
unscientific claims regarding battery-life increase under re-branded versions
(but, nevertheless, only useful for downloading other browsers, such as
Firefox or Chrome) of Internet Explorer.

All of this begins to sound a bit like a free version of Amazon's Mechanical
Turk platform. Further versions of such paper forms may actually be used for
outsourcing Turing Test questions to wetware, so that we could read further
waves of ridiculous articles copy-and-pasting misunderstandings regarding the
great achievements of the next "AI" which has "passed" the test.

------
rbanffy
I'd prove that by breaking the first law.

~~~
billpg
What if a robot concluded it had to acquire the car to prevent a human from
being harmed?

~~~
jschwartzi
If the Terminator asks you for your bike you should give it to him.

------
mywittyname
I'm an avid reader of jalopnik, but they love to misrepresent events in order
to manufacture outrage.

There are a handful of serious contributors to the site (Steve Lehto), but
Torchinsky is not one of them.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
A result of their Gawker heritage, no doubt.

------
walrus01
Do you like our owl?

------
kd0amg
_or (this is Marci’s joke) said “it doesn’t look like anything to me” when
they showed her the form?_

ReCAPTCHA always asks me to point out cars, street signs, and bridges. If
someone can't do that, the dealer maybe _shouldn 't_ sell that person a car.

Still seems a bit odd to have the forms that the dealer needs the buyer to
sign sufficiently exposed that they need captcha protection though.

------
carbonatedmilk
It's probably because of new EU legislation. Everyone's just trying to make
sure that they're Voight-Kampff compliant.

------
alex7o
You have to check for the damn replicants, you know.

------
earenndil
If a robot is successfully able to navigate the process of purchasing a car, I
would say it should be able to...

------
shaunpud
So they printed their online form... ʷᵒʷ

~~~
jasonmaydie
I think they print the online form, have the buyer fill it out (including the
stupid captcha) so they can go back and fill it online when the buyer is gone

------
Fnoord
Affirmation makes people feel happy, so that they're more content with [in
this case] their purchase.

------
Spooky23
I was disappointed that this wasn’t done for “security” purposes, as most dumb
things are.

------
fallingfrog
I would have said, "crap! You got me. I am a robot. Beep beep bloop."

