One of the most irritating things about modern life, you know, other than political polarization,
stagnating wages, and the feeling of somehow being socially isolated in a hyperconnect
environment, is how difficult these stupid little capture puzzles have gotten.
But why is this happening? A while ago, we did an episode on those super simple
I'm not a robot recaptures. And those aren't that bad. You just click a box and that's it.
But now it seems like we're having to solve these arcane picture puzzles, sometimes multiple
times simply to read a news article. So what gives?
Well, part of it is that the evolution of captures to become more annoying is part of an
ongoing arms race between spam, malware, and shopping bots on the one side, and cloud and
website operators trying to stop them on the other. Back in the day, bots were so dumb that
just a slightly distorted word or two could send them packing. But of course, it was quite easy
for fleshy humans to understand what was on the screen. But unsurprisingly, there's been a lot
of investment over the past couple of decades into automated optical character recognition,
or OCR, which helps digitize old books and other publications so that they're more easily searchable.
Doing this requires AIs to discern text even if it's distorted in some way. So over the years,
efforts were made to make them better at this. And unsurprisingly, the text we put into those
little capture tests help the AIs do this. Many captures use scans of distorted words
from real books or newspapers. And because we humans took so many of these tests,
we trained AIs to become very good at them. But unfortunately, AI algorithms can be used by bots.
So we stopped using word-based captures and moved on to those little picture puzzles.
For a while, picture captures proved more effective than word captures. But guess what?
Google, who's responsible for producing many of those picture puzzles,
uses human input on those to train their AIs as well. If you've noticed how lots of these
captures are photos of street signs, traffic lights, and crosswalks, etc., it's because
Google is taking all that data that you give it when solving these puzzles and using that
information to help build AIs for self-driving cars, as well as to improve the quality of results
on Google Maps. And again, AIs got really good at solving these puzzles, so the folks behind
capture have been making them progressively harder, much to the chagrin of you, the average
internet user, who's just trying to bulk-buy toilet paper online instead of schlepping up to
Walmart. But is there an end in sight to this arms race? The way those I'm-not-a-robot boxes work
without forcing you to solve a puzzle is by tracking your in-browser behavior, how fast you type,
how you move your mouse around, even the way you switch tabs to determine that you're human,
and not a bot that can input paragraphs of text in a matter of seconds or move a mouse to
precisely a single pixel location on the screen. Some engineers believe what we'll end up having
is a kind of suit-up version of this. There's no secret that you're constantly being tracked in
some form or another while you're online, so future versions of capture may not only track the way
you type or move your mouse, but also keep tabs on you more thoroughly through cookies and browser
activity to determine whether or not you're human. Such a capture would basically always be running
in the background on a browser level, so while it might help us beat the bots, there are obvious
privacy concerns, in addition to the fact that bots might end up beating these tests at some point
in the future as well. I just hope it doesn't get to the point where all computers come with a USB
connected DNA sample collector. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like,
hit subscribe, tell your friends, and hit us up in the comments section for your suggestions for
topics that we should cover in the future.