Dystopian Reverse Captchas

You encounter this strange “captcha.” What do you do?

Here’s a creativity assignment for aspiring science-fiction writers. If you saw this captcha, how would you pass it?

In a future run by AI, you, the protagonist, would have to pass reverse Turing Tests to survive. If the dystopia depicted above arrived today, here’s how I’d pass it:

• I’d make a Chrome extension that automatically clicks in the same spot of the captcha every time it encounters one. I’d also program it to do so within a few milliseconds of the page loading. This behavior mimics the way web crawlers bypass login or registration pages today.
• I would also want to use a VPN or proxy to pass the new captcha. Again, this behavior mimics how botnets currently use separate IP addresses to accomplish a million different things. In our emulation, we’d want websites that have safeguards against denial-of-service attacks to pick us up.
• Lastly, I’d try to submit the form without hitting the captcha, possibly skipping the DOM (document object model) rendering before doing so. Robot crawlers can read the web without having to render a page’s DOM. Thus, the trick to browsing this machine-friendly web would be to read it with an alternative browser, like lynx, and attempt to brute-force your way through the…