I have a question: why can't a robot just click "I'm not a robot"? turns out that the answer to that question is part of a bigger story about being human. the tech is called reCAPTCHA.
it stands for "completely automated public turing test to tell computers and humans apart. " you might remember some of these older versions or these. robots are pretty good at those ones now but the box test isn't really about the box.
it's tracking all kinds of other things about your behavior like for example where you put the mouse before you click the box. robots move like this but humans move kind of like this. in other words these aren't about what makes humans better than robots.
they're about what makes humans human. that's not new. it's the same question we've been thinking about for centuries and in a world where technology can do more and more surprising things, I think there's something kind of beautiful about constantly trying to figure out what makes us differentiated human.
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