The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Live Action Short was the 22-minute Dutch film I’m Not a Robot. It starts with a woman in an office working on her computer when she is faced with one of those CAPTCHA tests (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) where you are given a grid of boxes and asked to click on just those boxes that have show some particular item, such as a traffic light or a car or something similar to prove that you are not a robot. We have all encountered these things many times. So she does it but fails the first test. Again nothing unusual. It shows a different grid and she tries again. And fails again. And again. And again.
Frustrated, she calls tech support and after the person asks her some questions, raises the possibility that the reason she is failing may be because she actually is a robot. The film deals with how she reacts to that.
You can see the full film.
Readers will be familiar with the idea that we may actually be avatars in an advanced computer simulation. The reasoning behind it is that as computer simulations become ever more sophisticated in creating virtual worlds with avatars who look and behave realistically and as if they have wills of their own, at some point they will create one in which the avatars think that they are autonomous humans. How would we know if we have not already reached that state and we ourselves are indeed those avatars, thinking that we have wills of our own when we are merely doing what our controllers tell us to do?
The film reminded me of Black Mirror episodes that speculate on where technology might be taking us. Almost all of them show a dystopian future that rarely ends well for the protagonists. Apparently a new season of Black Mirror is expected to be released this year.
…as computer simulations become ever more sophisticated in creating virtual worlds with avatars who look and behave realistically and as if they have wills of their own, at some point they will create one in which the avatars think that they are autonomous humans. How would we know if we have not already reached that state and we ourselves are indeed those avatars, thinking that we have wills of our own when we are merely doing what our controllers tell us to do?
Yeah, I guess people who spend a lot of time and energy dealing with unreal simulations would start to think everything they see and know is just another unreal simulation. When your only tool is a hammer and all that…
Personally, I see no reason to start thinking along those lines. If the Universe we know is all just a simulation, that means there’s a whole other Universe “out there” in which someone(s) is/are creating this VR simulation. And I’m not about to just believe such a wild-ass claim without some evidence indicating the existence of another ‘verse. That’s a positive claim for the existence of something, so it’s up to whoever is making that claim to prove it.
PS: I wasn’t able to see enough of the protagonist’s screen to be sure, but it looked to me that she really WASN’T failing those Captcha tests. Just sayin’…
Raging Bee @2>
I wasn’t so careful, plus I’ve got the linguistic barrier of only speaking american(poorly), so… but I’d imagine/suspect that to be part of the thing.
On an aside, I can’t be the only person who has trouble with these over definitions, right? like, I’ll be given a photo and be told to click all squares with motorcycles, and it’s entirely scooters. or for “bridges”, and there is an overpass in there. etc.
possibly I’m the sexbot? but I’m kinda curious as to who would special-order this particular combination of traits…
I’ve got a feeling that a whole lot of the “universe is just a simulation” people really want it to be true so they don’t have to give a crap about others or who they hurt because none of them are real anyway. Because, as it turns out, a lot of tech bros are psychopaths and sociopaths who want to get rid of democracy and place themselves in charge. To disrupt society.
It’s really tough on the cyborgs: https://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/the-straw-that-broke-the-robocamels-exoskeleton
There’s one been doing the rounds recently of a captcha requesting that the user identify all squares containing traffic lights, but the image actually contains a road sign showing a traffic light, with a caption along the lines of “this captcha refused to accept I’m human until I professed to believe that this road sign really is a traffic light”. René Magritte would have found it hilarious… Of course, I’ve no idea whether it’s real or not.
As for the simulation hypothesis, as Iain M. Banks had one of his characters put it in The Algebraist: “Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.” It’s unfalsifiable by definition, so I don’t really see much point thinking about it. You may as well go with Last-Thursdayism.
Agree with all the comments above.
My own CAPTCHA story: it’s dismaying how often I get a pixel or two of overlap in a square. Say, part of a side mirror or kickstand for the motorcycle one. Does that count, or not? I’ve found that sometimes it counts and sometimes it doesn’t.
Voight- Kampff test?
It should first be applied to presidential candidates. In fact, throw every available test there is at presidential candidates.
“I’m not a robot” -- I believe her. Bots generally do not use contractions.
One another note, I read somewhere, maybe here, that CAPTCHA doesn’t really care about what boxes you check, it’s looking at the line your cursor is making, or something like that.
i saw a joke captcha the other day. it’s a picture of a snowy path in a forest. no people in sight. 13 of the 16 boxes are checked.
the instructions are to:
“Select all squares with
Finnish snipers”
A related cartoon
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/649/335/072/953/328/original/5e12fd1d09a71580.png
Monk : Buddha what makes us human ?
Buddha : Selecting all images with traffic lights.
These things are used to train AI. They don’t actually care if you can identify all the motorcycles or whatever -- the point is to have you train the AI to recognise all the motorcycles (or whatever).
I am certain that I am not an avatar in a simulation because my life is so damn boring. Who would bother to create a simulation to watch an avatar do routine things everyday?
Someone who needs NPCs to clean up after their fabulous VR adventures and look up at them with awe and envy?
Holy crap, Mano, look at your profile pic — you’re our Blue Shirt Guy!
Raging Bee @#14,
lochaber @#3
Or they’re asking for buses and I see only coaches or I just can’t see what the damn picture is at all. That probably means I’ve not rested my eyes from the screen enough or it’s late in the day when my double vision* gets worse and overcomes the correction my glasses give.
Tabby Lavalamp @#4
While I agree they want the excuse I don’t give them the benefit of a mental diagnosis, which could be used to excuse why they hold that position, I think they are entirely responsible for the selfish positions they hold.
* probably from astigmatism as the doubling is particularly evident in horizontal lines
quantum mechanics proves that we are in a simulation.
our world looks deterministic at large scales: it looks like we are in the real universe--but we are not.
On large scales, the normal laws of physics prevail, and the simulation runners just use General Relativity and n-dimensional matrix manipulations to simulate the universe we find ourselves in.
however, in the early 1900’s our simulation Overlords realized that we were probing smaller length scales, and the computing power to keep track of all 10^80 particles in our universe using GR was too much. so they decided to just use a random number generator for each quantum mechanical measurement we made.
for instance, rather than compute all the interactions of photons in the double slit experiment, the simulation just flips a coin to decide which slit the photon went through.
quantum mechanics randomness proves we are in a simulation.
(to save computing power, the moon isn’t there if you don’t look, and a tree that falls in the forest doesn’t make a sound)
(also, birds aren’t real.)
Monk : Buddha what makes us human ?
Buddha : Selecting all images with traffic lights.
Monk: What traffic lights?! We’re in the middle of nowhere! Does this mean none of us in this monastery are human?
Buddha: Crap, I hadn’t thought of that! I guess you all just have to go to the nearest city to prove you’re human.
lochaber @3: Objects in simulations have feelings too, and deserve to have their suffering minimized. (There are a few Black Mirror episodes that drive this point home, for those who need the help.)