Man versus Robot - man’s war against robots has already started and its different to what i expected
I have just filled in a few web forms and on each one there was a captcha mechanism asking me to prove that i was human.
It made me giggle and realise that mankind’s war against robots has already started and its different to what i expected.
Its not the guns blazing Terminator-esque battle that i thought it might be. Instead, its a war of misinformation where us humans are constantly trying to prove ourselves to other humans.
(Sorry robots, this blog post is for flesh an blood folk - you won’t understand how it feels to have your humanity questioned multiple times per day).
March 5th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
The messed up thing about this, is that it’s a robot checking to see if a human can come in. How does a computer know the difference between a human and a robot? For the moment, this captcha thing kind of works, but give it 10 years or so, and we won’t be able to outsmart them by just using character recognition.
The captcha method not only blocks out robots, but also really stupid or really drunk people.
If only we could just let the robot decide what was a real request and what wasn’t. I’d bet that if I gave you a virtual hamburger and a real one, you’d be able to taste the difference, but how would a robot know how to distinguish between something that exists and something that doesn’t. As far as it’s concerned, if the data it receives is there, it’s real. Unless it can trust a human to tell it what is real or not. But then how can it ever know if it’s a real human or not telling it what to trust?
I’m rambling, because it’s a big circle of falsehood, based solely on the idea that humans know anything. Which brings me to my main point… how do we know what is real and what isn’t?