Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

Honestly, as a driver, when I see a bicycle, I make sure to provide as much room around them as possible. When I see a motorcycle from behind, I have no idea what the thought processes of the rider will be and just continue on in a straight line and allow them to make a decision. A bicycle in my rearview mirror poses no threat as they cannot keep up. A motorcycle can easily overtake in way ordinary cars cannot (between lanes, etc). They are much more difficult to predict. (not even taking into consideration the tendancy of motorcycle drivers being less risk averse).

So, if you want to teach the AI that a bicycle and a motorcycle are the same thing, then yes, you might inadvertantly lead to an AI making the wrong decision leading to a death. I wouldn't necessarily blame you for picking the wrong image in a captcha, but I'd definitely blame the devs for not sanitizing user input.

I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online.

> I could not reasonably answer that question

I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this:

When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights.

> I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"

What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.

If the causality was a property of the images, those questions would have definitive answers.

But our emotions are not transmitted to us by inanimate objects or images. They come from within our psyches. There is an element of choice to what we feel. If there wasn’t, we would be zombies, or machines, or vulnerable imbeciles who could be overcome by an enemy combatant who would need no gun, knife or club - just a picture of a traffic light.