I AM NOT A ROBOT

I am not a robot. there, I've said it, what more do you want? Oh, I have to select which pictures have bicycles in them. Problem is, do you count motorbikes or not? Want me to select pictures of boats then? but is a dinghy a boat? is a hovercraft a boat? or a Yacht, or a tanker? really, make it clear. Okay, now you want me to draw a box around the biggest plane, choose which pictures have a crossing in them and decipher those wiggly barely legible set of letters and numbers. Lower case, upper case, is that an o or a 0? 

The irony is that I'm being asked to prove that I am a sentient being by a computer, or, basically a robot.

We have gone from service industries where the key tenets where "how can I help you?' to systems which require us to prove who, and what we are. The customer used to always be right, now the customer is the consumer, and the robots would have you believe that they are doing you a favour when you try to interact.

The pitfalls of trying to get anything done online are beset by the iniquities of required fields and the tyranny of robotic jobsworths telling you when and if you can move onto the next page of your online odyssey. It seems that man's mechanical helper has become the Orwellian figure that some predicted.