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One of the most irritating things about modern life, you know, other than political polarization,

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stagnating wages, and the feeling of somehow being socially isolated in a hyperconnect

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environment, is how difficult these stupid little capture puzzles have gotten.

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But why is this happening? A while ago, we did an episode on those super simple

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I'm not a robot recaptures. And those aren't that bad. You just click a box and that's it.

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But now it seems like we're having to solve these arcane picture puzzles, sometimes multiple

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times simply to read a news article. So what gives?

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Well, part of it is that the evolution of captures to become more annoying is part of an

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ongoing arms race between spam, malware, and shopping bots on the one side, and cloud and

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website operators trying to stop them on the other. Back in the day, bots were so dumb that

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just a slightly distorted word or two could send them packing. But of course, it was quite easy

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for fleshy humans to understand what was on the screen. But unsurprisingly, there's been a lot

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of investment over the past couple of decades into automated optical character recognition,

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or OCR, which helps digitize old books and other publications so that they're more easily searchable.

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Doing this requires AIs to discern text even if it's distorted in some way. So over the years,

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efforts were made to make them better at this. And unsurprisingly, the text we put into those

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little capture tests help the AIs do this. Many captures use scans of distorted words

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from real books or newspapers. And because we humans took so many of these tests,

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we trained AIs to become very good at them. But unfortunately, AI algorithms can be used by bots.

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So we stopped using word-based captures and moved on to those little picture puzzles.

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For a while, picture captures proved more effective than word captures. But guess what?

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Google, who's responsible for producing many of those picture puzzles,

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uses human input on those to train their AIs as well. If you've noticed how lots of these

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captures are photos of street signs, traffic lights, and crosswalks, etc., it's because

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Google is taking all that data that you give it when solving these puzzles and using that

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information to help build AIs for self-driving cars, as well as to improve the quality of results

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on Google Maps. And again, AIs got really good at solving these puzzles, so the folks behind

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capture have been making them progressively harder, much to the chagrin of you, the average

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internet user, who's just trying to bulk-buy toilet paper online instead of schlepping up to

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Walmart. But is there an end in sight to this arms race? The way those I'm-not-a-robot boxes work

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without forcing you to solve a puzzle is by tracking your in-browser behavior, how fast you type,

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how you move your mouse around, even the way you switch tabs to determine that you're human,

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and not a bot that can input paragraphs of text in a matter of seconds or move a mouse to

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precisely a single pixel location on the screen. Some engineers believe what we'll end up having

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is a kind of suit-up version of this. There's no secret that you're constantly being tracked in

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some form or another while you're online, so future versions of capture may not only track the way

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you type or move your mouse, but also keep tabs on you more thoroughly through cookies and browser

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activity to determine whether or not you're human. Such a capture would basically always be running

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in the background on a browser level, so while it might help us beat the bots, there are obvious

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privacy concerns, in addition to the fact that bots might end up beating these tests at some point

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in the future as well. I just hope it doesn't get to the point where all computers come with a USB

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connected DNA sample collector. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like,

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hit subscribe, tell your friends, and hit us up in the comments section for your suggestions for

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topics that we should cover in the future.