Dealership Makes Woman Sitting Right in Front of Them Confirm She's Not a Robot | Hacker News Reader

Dealership Makes Woman Sitting Right in Front of Them Confirm She's Not a Robot

jalopnik.com

83 pointsedward29 comments

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.”

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

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?

There is huge gap between "mark you are not robot by pencil" and "well she said she wanted the $500 paint upgrade even though she didn’t write it down". I am pretty sure that more reasonable, but still crystal clear, line exists.

Especially in widely distributed company, with workers of various skill levels and cultures, someone is guaranteed to conclude that "rules in this company are dumb, so it only dumb people fully follow them " - e.g. less compliance anywhere where you can not immediately check the rules.

I've seen smart people making dumb mistakes on a bad day. You simply can't trust any random person's judgment and lose money along the way.

I am not going to say that this is a bad thing.

It's a red flag, if they care so little about the documentation they put in front of you before the sale then what are they going to be like after.

I'd probably walk away.

Part of effectively managing geographically-scaled companies is figuring out how to grant sufficient autonomy to local offices. There's a constant tug-of-war between, on the one hand, a desire to establish standards so as to protect the brand, and promote a consistent experience for customers across locations - and on the other hand, providing autonomy to local offices so that they can provide personalized service, i.e. the opposite of the "faceless corporate drone" archetype, because otherwise you're hurting the very brand you're trying to protect.

If your employees feel like they're slaves to meaningless head-office regulations, your policy is probably unbalanced.

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

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.

Bit of an absurd nit, but... Doesn't the "click correct images as they appear" captcha style make this impossible?

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.

I'd prove that by breaking the first law.

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

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

Most Asimov robots get stuck when they need to compare two different violations of the first law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_(short_story)

It would get stuck trying to decide whether lease or purchase it outright.

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.

It's tongue-in-cheek.

A result of their Gawker heritage, no doubt.

Do you like our owl?

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.

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

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

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

So they printed their online form... ʷᵒʷ

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

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

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

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

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