I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. Alan Turing.
All right folks, I am willing to reluctantly concede that there must be some deep-seated logic behind why certain websites ask you to confirm if you are human by clicking your uptick mark of confirmation on the box helpfully provided. I look in the mirror. Two hands and feet fully accounted for with requisite fingers and toes, all other parts of the human anatomy in place and what is more, I am biped and can think and speak four languages. Yes, I am a human being! Before I researched this subject thoroughly to be better informed on what appeared patently to be an absurdity, I would routinely click on the box to let Big Brother know that I do indeed belong to the species of homo sapiens. That I am not some galactic, brushed-aluminium, ‘avatar’ conceived by James Cameron and descended from Mars or even further afield in the Milky Way.
Nevertheless, like the mechanical, unthinking, non-sentient beings we tend to be for the most part, I kept clicking on that idiotic box reflexively, with nary a thought as to why I was doing it. I once asked a chap from the information technology world why we are being asked to tick a box in order for the nerds to confirm that we are descended from the apes, before the wonders of a particular website are revealed to us. To which he answered laconically, ‘Because it is there.’ I thought he was just trying to be ironic, but then again, to the best of my knowledge and experience, most of these geeks from the technology world probably haven’t even heard of the word irony and would not recognise it if it was handed to them on a plate strewn with rose petals. For them, what you see is what you get. No understated, hidden suggestions. Anyhow, I refused to be fobbed off by his monosyllabic, muttered answers (a common trait with the I.T. community) and I pressed him further.
‘How do you mean “because it is there”? Can you be more specific?’ I could sense the mesh network in his brain whirring, the chemical and electrical synapses clicking into place for a few seconds before he answered.
‘Look my friend, to be perfectly honest, I have not given it a thought. If a box appears on my screen, I just go ahead and click on it for the simple reason that if I don’t, I will not be able to proceed to the next step. Simple as that.’
‘I know that,’ I said irritably. ‘I do the same thing, but I am not you. You work in this big tech firm and you should know about all these things. What happens if I click on one of these boxes and my bank account gets cleaned out? We read about it every day in the papers. That’s what frightens the life out of me.’
He seemed quite amused. “No, no, nothing like that can happen if you take adequate precautions. This is quite different. You are requested by websites to verify you are human, bizarre as that sounds, to block automated bots.’
I frowned. ‘You sound so convincing, if bizarre, but it is still Double Dutch to me. For instance, what in heaven’s name are automated bots and why do they need to be blocked? Plain English, please.’
My nerdy friend smiled at me, somewhat patronisingly, I thought. ‘Look I don’t have the time or the inclination to give you a ready reckoner on the rapidly-evolving software world. Let us just say that by confirming your status as a human being, as opposed to a quadruped or a mollusc, the website protects you from malicious online activities like spamming comment sections, scraping content to train AI models, stuffing passwords or crashing servers with overloaded traffic. Capish?’
By now my techie pal had digitally pushed me base over apex. ‘Good grief, Italian and everything. I am impressed. You know what, you might as well have narrated that entire spiel in Italian for all the sense that I was able to make of it. Thanks for nothing.’ I wished him well in his endeavours and hoped that his company employs English translators to translate computer speak in English for the common man.
As I shook hands and took leave, he smiled broadly and said, ‘I will pass that on to my bosses. Ciao!’ Again, with the Italian. He must have been sent to Rome or Florence to do a crash course on ‘Bots, their treatment in sickness and in health.’ Or something like that anyway.
A couple of days later found me signing in online to access my bank account. I needed to check my accounts and verify some recent transactions. In earlier times, I only had to key in my username and password (which I am encouraged to change every three months) and the details of my ill-gotten gains would be instantly revealed. More recently, for my own safety naturally, the bank website has introduced a rectangle which they call CAPTCHA, in which is preprinted a jumble of letters and numerals which are, more often than not, virtually impossible to decipher. Illegibility being a sine qua non for the bank’s purpose. However, decipher the CAPTCHA you must and faithfully reproduce it in an accompanying box, else you will be barred for 24 hours from entering your own accounts page (after the third failed try).
In order to understand more, I naturally visited Google Uncle and this is what he had to say. ‘CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a security mechanism used by websites to verify that a user is a real human rather than an automated bot or malicious script.’ We are again ccaught up in that rarefied world of bots, and it has taken all this fooling around with gobbledegook to tell the difference between us humans and ‘bots and malicious scripts.’ Incidentally, what in heaven’s name is ‘Turing?’ Anything to do with Alan Turing, quoted at the top of this piece, the genius British computer scientist who was chemically castrated for being gay and took his own life as a result? I know this because I saw the wonderful biopic, The Imitation Game, starring the incandescent Benedict Cumberbatch.
I am somewhat comforted to learn that all this is being done and constantly revised to keep us in a state of ‘healthy flux’ only for our own good. There are some very evil people out there who will think nothing of being one step ahead of these automated bots such that they can ‘imprison’ old and vulnerable people in their own homes and rob them, digitally, of every last paise they own. Not a day passes when our newspapers do not report an octogenarian robbed of his or her life savings by some ruthless crooks who have mastered the art of inveigling vulnerable elders into their vicious web while cocking a snook at bots and CAPTCHAs. These behavioural checks, as my tech wizard friend likes to call them, must be bravely borne by us common folk for our own good – that phrase again. My sickroom matron at boarding school used to say the same thing when she forced Epsom salts down our throats. ‘Don’t be such a fusspot. It’s for your own good. It will clear your tummy and you will feel wonderful.’ Leaving us kids, for the rest of the day, standing restlessly on one leg in front of the school bogs, agony writ large on our faces, till the other fellow sufferer rushes out retching and groaning, holding his stomach. It does not bear thinking.
A pox on all bots, say I. And the same goes for CAPTCHAs.
Published with permission from Suresh Subrahmanyan – A long time advertising professional, now retired, and taken up writing as a hobby. Deeply interested in music of various genres, notably Carnatic and 60’s and 70’s pop/rock. An avid tennis and cricket fan. Voracious reader of British humour and satire. P.G. Wodehouse a perennial favourite. He blogs at – https://sureshsubrahmanyan.blog/
