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Comment by ilovetux | Hacker News Reader

I never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it! Not only that but training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing seems like they just made almost everyone into accessories of mass killings. I have to come to terms with this and I don't know how I will do it but something will have to be done because this is unconscionable.

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> we won't see a dime of it!

We users click through recaptchas because they're better at spam prevention and they're free. Why would we expect to get paid for two seconds of thought?

> training autonomous military drones with dishonest crowdsourcing

The recaptcha in the article is fake. Do either of the citations mention recaptchas for drones?

> Why would we expect to get paid for two seconds of thought?

Because the results of those two seconds of thought have value.

Further, we don't know the value. Thought seems cheap to us, but it is clearly valuable to the companies that use it. How do we know it is a fair deal without knowing our thoughts' worth?

It seems unfair to ask us to trade for glass beads.

>We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it!

I have to disagree. We Americans will reap the benefit of a growing stock market and top level military as we passively support the industrial scale automated vaporization of anyone deemed foe with fleets of intelligent killer robots. It's a wonderful future we've created for ourselves.

So... Project Insight? Hail Hydra!

I feel like this stuff is scary enough to stand on its own without invoking whatever blockbuster comic book movie you saw most recently

> won't see a dime of it

It's a business relationship. They provide you with search, entertainment, mail, maps, docs. You provide them with samples of human behavior and with supervised training data.

Is it worth 5 seconds of your time to help them train their neural net, in exchange for access to their services?

Should our answers change if instead of Google or FB, it was Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics?

Depends on if that nueral net is being used to digitize old books to make them searchable, or to help a government’s military automate killing other humans.

If you don’t pay for a service, you are the product.

Never for a second believe that what you have with Google is a business relationship. As far as analogies go, you are the cow, and they provide you with a feeder and a shed.

Is it even ethical to be or remain an American anymore? We can't claim we don't know better anymore.

>we won't see a dime of it!

I mean, if you're in the US you do live in the safest place in terms of foreign invasion in the world.

Sure, if you myopically only look at a narrow definition foreign invasion. But we're not the safest place in the world from attack by any stretch of the imagination. Our aggression in other countries has made us a target for revenge.

I thought we all agreed we would never forget 9/11.

How many attacks in the List of Islamic Terrorist Attacks[1] page occur in the US? How many occur in Switzerland?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...

I think it is very unfair to compare any country on earth with a heavy outlier like Switzerland (has been neutral for +200 years and did/does business with everyone, sold heavy weaponry to both the US and Japan during WWII etc.)

I live there, this country is smart and unique.

I agree. The original analogy would have been better served with Canada as a reference.

Edit: Or even better Italy.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/why-has-italy-...

The person I'm responding to said, "I mean, if you're in the US you do live in the safest place in terms of foreign invasion in the world." (emphasis mine). Their wording indicates that they think the US is also a heavy outlier in terms of safety. So I think the comparison is fair.

I picked Switzerland because it's a fairly unambiguously disproof of their statement, but I agree that there are a great many other examples of places which are safer from attack by an outsider than the US. Depending the criteria you use to measure this, the US probably doesn't even rank in the top 10.

> I never thought about those recaptcha things. I feel guilty and almost dirty for helping them do these things. I also feel ripped off. We are programming their computers with our data and they are using our work and intelligence to train systems which will make them billions and we won't see a dime of it!

Umm, you are "paying" them with a tiny amount of labour in exchange for getting a web page (or some other access). It's a microtransaction.

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