Since it's the weekend at time of writing, I thought I'd bring you some silliness that was hashed out in a chat room and that you shouldn't take seriously (except the bit about CCD; that is a serious issue).
HCAPTCHA: Draw a tight bounding box around the fire truck.
Me: Does just that.
CAPTCHA: Please try again. [This charade repeats about six times.]
Me: Urgh! Can you not waste my time with this?
This happened to me with standard HCAPTCHA. CAPTCHA, in general, is slowly descending into madness so it's only a matter of time before we get a "draw a tight bounding box around the dead body" one with an owl corpse, according to common consensus. I'm not sure why we've been training computers to shoot koalas, owls and seahorses in the middle of their heads. It's rather concerning. Teddy bears and gemstones, too, for that matter (although I suspect those are false flags to hide the true intentions). That's just where it starts. Where does it end, wolves and bison? No, because we humans have massacred them already. It ends with the bees. It's always been about the bees. The rest is just a distraction. You see, if the bees go, so do we. We need them for sustaining agriculture. Without honey bees to pollinate their flowers, crops fail and we die of starvation. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a serious issue, to be sure. Scientists aren't sure why it's happening, but it could well be a consequence of climate change. There are possibly other factors, like a higher number of burrower mites making their way into bee hives and preying on larvae. Whatever the cause, it could have an economic impact to the tune of over ten billion dollars on the northern hemisphere alone.
I think I see the big picture now. Forget about self-aware robots launching nukes and gunning everyone down in the wake of their rampage; that's way too obvious and requires more technological development than we can currently manage. They've settled for a less ambitious and grandiose approach by utilising what's currently feasible and offers a more subtle approach: Kill the things on which we depend in order to bring us down. They're playing the long game with several different attack vectors. For example, targeting cats: No more cats, no more videos of cats, no more Interweb. No more Interweb means people won't be able to look up and watch videos on how to open doors, leading to people being stuck inside buildings, making us easy targets.
It's both very smart and very subtle, that multiple-pronged attack! Film and television has taught us to expect big scary robots with red eyes and metal skeletons running amok. AI knows this, having consumed our media, so it knows what to avoid in order not to inadvertently give us any warning. Meanwhile, sinister forces we didn't expect are afoot when our guard is down, while we're busy helping them to identify emergency services that could help us when they finally strike and which they'll likely eliminate before they do!
It's not the big things that ultimately get you and cause the biggest problems; it's the small ones you didn't see coming.
Have a good weekend, folks (and don't forget to like, tip and subscribe). Also, hoard those cat videos and contribute to funding research on CCD and saving honey bees!
Thumbnail image: Photo by Omer Faruq Khan on Pexels