Today we will be looking at a programming feature that needs no introduction, the average netizen groans when they see it because it means added stress, at the same time software engineers call it a necessary evil as it's quite useful. We will be looking at CAPTCHA. We've all come across platforms that ask us to click a checkbox in order to prove that we're not robots and one has to wonder why we need to prove to machines that we're not machines. It turns out that this feature was put in place to protect software solutions and humans.
Software engineering is known for automating processes, it's one of the major highs of software development, however, this can sometimes be an issue as some software solutions are built to harvest data and cause irregularities on some platforms. A lot of software solutions rely on data from real people, this data is used to make analysis and business decisions, prior to CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), robots (bots) could flood polls, platforms and other software solutions with false data that made it hard to sort through things.
On social media we had bots that would register on social media, create ghost followers and fake engagement on posts all of which tried to outsmart the algorithm of these enterprise solutions, sometimes these bots can harvest all the data on a platform. On a lighter note, CAPTCHA actually proves that humans are a lot smarter than machines, the ability humans have in terms of figuring things out unassisted is something machines are unable to do because they require clearly represented data.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
CAPTCHA while annoying is one of the reasons why hackers can't just send a bot to get the usernames of everyone on LinkedIn, their jobs and target them or being able to leaf through obtain records of every user registered on publicly available digital platforms. Google also happened to provide other utilities for CAPTCHA when they acquired ReCAPTCHA. They were able to digitize the archives of the New York Times as well as Google Book. This was done by everyone who had to pass ReCAPTCHA tests.
FINALLY...
There are a lot of important things that need to be done that it too expensive to pay people for. Imagine if we could digitize all texts that existed before the internet, thus preserving the content now and in the future. These are some of the things we can't put a price on. On the other hand, machines are learning from us on how we pass CAPTCHA tests and some sophisticated machines can now pass CAPTCHA tests. It is reasonable to be wary of the shrinking intelligence gap between humans and machines. All in all, I believe we may have learned to appreciate CAPTCHA today. As with all things in life, tradeoffs are key, a safer internet for everyone will require us to sacrifice a bit of convenience in the short run.