Recently, I had to sign into my Outlook account from a new computer and had to go through a number of security checks to verify my identity.  All well and good.  I have no problem with caution.  “Better to be safe than sorry” could be my design for living.

However, one security check had me stumbling.  The one to prove I was a human.

It was a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) test designed to weed out bots.  It should have been easy.  After all, I knew I was a human and not a bot.  I just had to convince a bot that I was a human and not a bot.

I stared at the test.  My eyes glazed over.  It was an incomprehensible puzzle in front of me.  What was I supposed to do?  Normally, I am quite good at tests.  Sudoku?  Top banana.  Dates of the Kings and Queens of England?  No problem.  I can recite them backwards.  Unfortunately, with all these kinds of tests, though, the bots are still better at them than me.  Knowing that Edward III reigned from 1327 to 1377 no longer proves that I am human.

No, instead, what I had to make sense of was some kind of blurry, distorted image linking a number of random shapes on one side of the screen with a variety of seemingly-unconnected pictures on the other side of the screen.  I stared and I stared, hoping for enlightenment; my belief in my own humanity gradually eroding with each uncomprehending minute.

What did my lack of understanding mean?  Perhaps I was just a bot after all?  I had failed the “prove yourself to be a human” test.  I could no longer walk among my fellow beings and consider myself one of their number.  I was nothing more than that invisible scourge, which Microsoft was attempting to identify only to purge.  I felt like a migrant upon the shores of my own reality; Microsoft a Farage-like figure denying me entry into a world that I had heretofore presumed as my birthright.

It took a time but, eventually, I did crack the CAPTCHA puzzle; managed to work out what I was meant to do with the squiggly numbers and distorted images; more importantly, managed to prove to an anonymous virtual entity something that I already knew to be an inviolate Truth: I am a human.

It got me thinking, though.  Some people would not have been able to solve this particular CAPTCHA.  Some real life, genuine, fully paid-up member of the species Homo sapiens would not have been able to convince Microsoft that they were a human.  A subtle system of virtual eugenics is in operation.  The result?  Denial to an increasingly virtual world to people that can’t prove they are human; moreover, can’t prove they are human to a machine.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree wonders what Alan Turing would have made of all this?