I am worried about these newest Captchas
Sometimes we forget the people we love, but I’ve never forgotten anyone or anything I’ve hated — which is why everybody knows what a Captcha is.
It used to be Captchas were just irritating bits of text that you had to have perfect vision and an IQ of 140 to be able to decipher
But then the companies that owned our souls decided they could get a little bit extra work out of us by giving us visual recognition images to solve so they could train their next generation of AI bots to replace us.
And that was fine, for a while, although over time the determination of what was in or outside a square, and what really was a traffic light anyway became harder and harder to understand, and in the process many of us became less and less human.
After a bit I started to get the feeling that perhaps the AIs had already begun replacing people, and the Captchas were maybe something an AI would think was important and that most people wouldn’t have a clue about
And that was also fine, I thought it was nice, these nerdy little bots out there sharing porny captchas of stuff they found hot and exciting. But then things started getting a bit weird.
And I must admit it worried me a bit that Captcha failed me when I selected these squares
Why, if you already know the answer, do you ask? I’m not going to be using a laser rifle anytime in the near future to kill humans, what does it matter if I mistake and only shoot a tiny little hole in some guy’s shirt, or graze a sexy shoulder?
But I noticed more and more the automated systems delivering captchas to me wanted to know about how to kill people.
Which was something I knew absolutely nothing about, so more and more I failed the captchas. The algorithms that rule our lives were determining more and more that I was not human.
There was only one logical conclusion.
I had to get better at killing people so I could pass these new, more difficult to fool captchas.
And that’s just what I did! Over the next few weeks I went out every night and tried to kill people, at first I wasn’t any good at it, but I did learn what parts of the body were not so good to stab, and I got better.
And with my improvements my life also got better, I no longer had to go through innumerable captchas before being rewarded with cute kitten pix!!
The local news might have been in a panic about the uncaught serial killer terrorizing the city, but my life was good, I felt fully human for the first time in forever — and the machines agreed!
But just when it seemed that the computers running the captchas and I had reached some form of rapprochement they started to up the violence quotient a bit more
It was like the machines knew what I was doing, and they were pushing me to do it more. I tried skipping but the computers somewhere in the heart of Google that run all of humanity were very intent on me killing people, and not just any people, specific well-targeted people and always with the same taunting message
Who you gonna kill tonight, KillBot #21996
It really stopped seeming like a question, and became more like an instruction! And of course the more I refused that instruction, the more my supply of cute kitty pics dried up
What could I really do? I did what I was told. I started hunting down the people that Google’s captcha service told me to kill, and I killed them. The kitty picture supply situation went back to normal
Still I wondered about that number — #21996. Did it mean anything? I figured I’d ask Gary, a guy I used to go to school with who was now working for Google in some town called Mountain View — which is in California. There’s a two hour time difference, so I called him at 10 in the morning my time, I tend to wake up late anyway because of being out all night killing people.
At first it took a bit to get Gary to understand what I was talking about. But finally he agreed to look into it and get back to me later that day. He said he doubted the number really meant anything, it was probably randomly generated and so it just seemed like a high number because the random number generator would have a high range on it, I can’t say I really know what all that means — but Gary evidently did.
I didn’t hear back from Gary that day. Or the next. So I called Google, the receptionist at the end was saddened to tell me that Gary had been killed the other night by a mysterious serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and nearby areas — which I guess means Mountain View is near San Francisco.
Damn, ain’t this just my luck I thought, I get somebody to help me and they end up getting killed mysteriously. I decided to go on the internet and look at some cute kittens to take my mind off my problems.
Oh Man, these new captchas are so damn difficult. Every square has part of the image of my ruler in it! I guess I have to click all of them.
That’s just life I guess.
