Are You Human
Did you ever try to go to a website but couldn’t because you failed the dreaded Captcha test. You know the one: You enter all the required information, and just as you're about to access the site, a box pops up, demanding that you prove your humanity. It's a series of pictures- motorcycles, crosswalks, buses, cars, trucks - things everyone should know. But here's the kicker. The image is divided into nine boxes, like a tic-tac-toe game, and your task is to click on every (and only every) box with the picture in it.
You might think this would be easy since you know what a motorcycle, car, etc. are. The only trick question is: You have to know the difference between a street sign and a highway sign. But that's unusual. So you start clicking and get it wrong. Now, the computer does not tell you what you got wrong any more than Facebook, when punishing you for offensive comments, discloses what you posted that earned you the punishment of temporarily or even permanently blocking your
entry into its hallowed halls. In Captchas, no message says, "You made an error; try again" or "You are an idiot; because we feel sorry for you, we'll give you another chance," Nope. It (whatever it is) goes, posts another picture, and gives you the same assignment. I don't know how many times it would take to pass if you clicked random boxes. But, I do know that I rarely get it on the first try, that I've had to try again and again before passing, and that, at times, I've given up after deciding that whatever I was looking for on the URL (if I still remember it (was not worth the agita of passing the darn captcha.
If you have gotten this far, you are wondering (unless you have had this experience yourself) why this would be so difficult. Imagine a motorcycle and nine squares (remember? like tic-tac-toe). You scrutinize the motorcycles and board. Is that tiny red dot part of the motorcycle?? Is that white nanodot part of a crosswalk or not? And, you are so used to clicking quickly, you may not have studied the photo in question carefully enough. So you fail repeatedly, over and over, again and again. Maybe while this happens, you start wondering whether something is wrong with you. How many people are so stupid they cannot pass a test to get into a computer site? Or what if they don't WANT you to get in? Are you politically Conservative? LGBTQ? Are they censoring?
I have a high IQ. I mention this not out of pride at the gift that God, my parents, a combination of the two, or something else gave me. The reason is: If people of superior intelligence, have trouble passing the captcha test, what about the rest of humanity? Are they doing this on purpose? Is this a Mensa test?
So one day, I was filling out one of these things when 'light bulb!.' I might have laughed aloud (literally, not lol) if the world was not so absurd. Get this: A computer tests me to see if I am human. Is there anything more ridiculous than this? Admittedly, the lines are getting blurred, BUT if a computer is not human, how can it tell whether, or not I am? And if you are questioning my logic here, consider this: If a computer gives you the task and determines whether you are right or wrong, it KNOWS the answer. In that case, we must conclude that computers are human. And if they get it on the first try ( and probably would), that makes them more human than you or I. But how can this be?
We now live in a world where things that can't happen are commonplace. Still, it isn't fair for a computer to decide I am not a human. Could a computer pass the test? Any computer? An AI?, GPT? A quantum computer?
So, what's the solution? Let's unite, set up camp at 'Captcha Central,' and demand what we deserve: a captcha-free internet experience. These tactics have worked before. But there are so many other problems in the world: wars, hate between political enemies, aliens streaming through our borders, inflation, the cost of gas, the cost of food, and presidents who are criminals. I can't name them all; articles can't be that long. Captcha injustice is trivial by comparison, but what will the world be like when countless trivial things are sidelined because they are not nuclear war?
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