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Its getting weird when you have to fill that box in with pen and paper Marci Robin was buying a Fiat 500X from a West Palm Beach, Florida dealership, and was i
by codeulike 8y ago
Its getting weird when you have to fill that box in with pen and paper
Marci Robin was buying a Fiat 500X from a West Palm Beach, Florida dealership, and was in the final stages of signing all the paperwork, when she was presented with a strange but simple question: was she a robot?
This wasn’t online or anything, she was right there, in person, in front of the sales person, who wanted her to check a box, with a pen, on real paper, confirming that she was not, in fact, a robot. She claims she isn’t.
https://jalopnik.com/dealership-makes-woman-sitting-right-in-front-of-them-c-1826232532 https://jalopnik.com/dealership-makes-woman-sitting-right-in...
edit: and the original tweet: https://twitter.com/MarciRobin/status/998030243981033472 https://twitter.com/MarciRobin/status/998030243981033472
- rothron 8y agoThis would've made an awesome SciFi short story. The twist at the end is that she's lying.
- codeulike 8y agoI can't imagine that a car dealership would even care, as long as they got to sell a car. "Oh dang, you ticked the 'not a robot' box but you are actually a robot ... Ah, no worries, I'll put a call in to head office, get the paperwork changed. Well, enjoy your car! ... And don't forget to come back in six months for your free oil change! ... for the car, I mean."
- kaybe 8y agoAre there rules against selling to robots? I mean, a great portion of the stock exchange is just that, essentially, no?
- palunon 8y agoRobots can't own property, as they are not recognized as a person. You may sell to someone represented by a robot, but you're not selling to the robot. When using a vending machine, your making a trade with the vending machine company, not the machine itself.
- likeclockwork 8y agoCan a robot be the sole asset, employee, and officer of a corporation?
- palunon 8y agoA robot cannot be an employee or officer of a corporation, you need to be a person for that.
- kaybe 8y agoHm, so selling to a robot without someone behind to represent would be extralegal I guess, and if any problems occur during the trade you'd be on your own? The closest thing would probably trades with wild animals. Are there any laws on that? (Probably not, but the situation is not unthinkable.)
- rzzzt 8y agoThe salesman is a robot as well.
- pxtail 8y agoAnd the car
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- newsbinator 8y ago... but still not the paper form.
- rzzzt 8y agoThe car is buying itself with the money it earned as a cab.
- puranjay 8y agoI wonder if in the far future we'll have two androids pretending to be human and trying to fool each other at the same time, only for them to realize that they are both, in fact, robots
- widforss 8y agoWhich is a proper strategy to train robots to be human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
- cortesoft 8y agoIsn't that basically 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'?
- Kurtz79 8y agoAlso, "Impostor", still by P.K.Dick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_(short_story)
- TrevorAustin 8y agoI really liked the added wrinkle in Blade Runner 2049 where replicants have to periodically prove that they're sufficiently robotic.
- tokyodude 8y agoMore like Second Variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
- mxtopher 8y agoMore like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_(short_story)
- tzmudzin 8y agohttp://www.elib.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Lem.pdf http://www.elib.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Lem.pdf Definitely one of my favorite reads from my youth days...
- zxcvbn4038 8y agoI had roughly the same problem. My facebook career lasted for all of thirty seconds before they decided I was a robot and banned my account. I appealed and they asked me to send a photo. I sent them a photo and they said I was still a robot and there was no further appeal. Very helpful. So my choices from that point are to 1) shame them in the media and hope its an entertaining enough story that people like it or 2) do something better with my time then facebook. I chose the latter.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- shawnz 8y agoWere you using an unusual user agent or a VPN or something?
- askvictor 8y agoWhy would they bother checking the user agent when it's the easiest thing to spoof (really, you probably can't even call it spoofing)
- shawnz 8y agoI'd bet that the vast majority of botters/phishers which Facebook deals with are amateurs. That said, I meant using unusual user agent software, not really just having an unusual user agent string.
- HenryBemis 8y agoNo need for software, one can easy change it on the about:config of Firefox and/or there are some cool add-ons that can rotate/change the user agent of a Firefox on the "desired frequency"
- adrianhel 8y agoWe have a Wordpress site that suddenly saw a surge of hacking attempts. Turns out they all had IE7 user agents. Blocked that, not a problem anymore. Wouldn't surprise me if big sites use simple measures for such simple attack attempts as well.
- smelendez 8y agoSounds like they're filling out an online form acting as the buyer, which might be in uncharted territory legally, and they want to dot every i.
- Jill_the_Pill 8y agoDealership's just getting ready for autonomous vehicles that try to sneak out.
- jarjar12 8y agoMay be They are preparing for the future. We should start protesting to make sure robots can buy cars.
- opportune 8y agothis reminds me of a cargo cult or something. People following strange rituals they observed others perform for no reason
- khacking 8y agoAnd that reminds me of the monkey and banana problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_and_banana_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_and_banana_problem
- blihp 8y agoInteresting. Not sure if it's a gag or for some sort of handwriting/stroke analysis. Or it could be a variation on the M&M contract clause (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/) to try to verify that they actually read the contract.
- cardiffspaceman 8y agoI'm left wondering, what if they said you were lying when you ticked the box? What would it mean for the transaction?
- onetimemanytime 8y ago>>"...she was right there, in person, in front of the sales person, who wanted her to check a box, with a pen, on real paper, confirming that she was not, in fact, a robot. She claims she isn’t. All robots claim not to be one, so we must be really careful. probably printed app from website and the dealer took it literally
- peeters 8y agoI'm the kind of guy that would be willing to walk away from a sale to test what would happen if I refused to check that box.
- Sylamore 8y agoI had to do this at CarMax on a recent purchase, it felt as silly as you think it is.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- c3534l 8y ago> She claims she isn’t. I wonder if the subtlety of that joke will be lost on future generations one day.
- mcv 8y agoI think the entire story will be lost on some future generation, unless you add to the end: "but perfectly human-like robots didn't even exist back then!"
- INTPenis 8y agoIt made for funny headlines but anyone with a little insight into corporate can guess that they simply printed a form from their computer. Likely from their website. A form normally designed to be used online was sent over paper mail and happened to include online elements like captcha. If anything you should exclude such html elements from the print page with css.
- codeulike 8y agoWell yes obviously they had printed out an online form. But they made her fill it in. Thats the funny bit. And yes its clearly to do with employees not quite knowing what to do with the paper version and so just shrugging and say yep you'd better fill it in anyway. Thats all pretty obvious. Its still interesting though, as a little slice of corporate anthropology.