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by Sahithya Papireddy

At 10 AM, on February 25th, 2052, I sat nervously with a glass of water and a set of notes prepared with the help of Gemini’s chatbot, waiting for the web portal on my laptop to load Gemini’s AI-powered hiring assistant to take my interview for a job in Altruo’s ethics team. I was, however, first faced with the paradoxical “Prove that you’re human” page to make sure I wasn’t a bot. These checks with their mix of letters and numbers and the boxes of bicycles in the past had always been annoying but they couldn’t compare with the emotional exhaustion of today’s webcam-based checks. After all, the only thing separating us and what we deem as our “assistants” was the ability to feel emotions. And so, I went ahead, hesitant yet powerless, while a set of intense gifs loaded onto my screen. The webcam started capturing the live feed, gauging my reaction to these gifs that ranged from the cutest little puppy that would make the average person’s face squish with cute aggression to a soldier at war, his intestines spilling out, that would make even the strongest man wrought with grimace. Finally, a pop-up window opened up on my screen, “We couldn’t identify you as human” it said. I had told myself something similar as I stared at myself in the mirror after the acid attack some years ago - “You’re not human, you look like a monster". I’ve come a long way since; I didn’t click on the ‘Try again’ button on the window and instead reached out to the help and support button. I let out a smile, this very loophole in the portal revealed that they needed someone in their ethics team, a real human, now more than ever.