This is a CAPTCHA image. If you live in the present tense, you’ve seen one like it. It’s the picture that pops up on your device when you’re trying to access digital information that already belongs to you. When you see this childlike puzzle, it’s because you’ve just clicked a button that made you swear to the digital gods, “I’M NOT A ROBOT.” Which, when you saw it the first time, you thought was a ridiculous, McCarthy-esque pledge. “Of course I’m not a freakin’ robot, you idiot!” You clicked the statement with confidence. And suddenly, this little mindblower arrived: a quotidian scene, divided into a grid. It’s really more like a cyber Cerberus guarding the gates of the underworld. Its evil bark mocks you: “WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT, UNWORTHY HUMAN!”
Your device now asks you to do the impossible: figure out which of the squares contains a traffic light. Or a bus. Or an animal. And click each one. Or not. You are left hoping and praying — as only a human can — that you can decipher this street view of dystopian horror, and use all of your earthly powers to identify each instance of a traffic light. Correctly. So that you can unlock your own information from the hellscape of the internet.
CAPTCHA, cutely enough, stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Ok. Cool. Uh huh. Sure. Hmmm…. Makes sense. Right? But wait. What?
As acronyms go, CAPTCHA is a doozy.
The “Turing” part of that gobbledygook is a good place to start. That would be Alan Turing, the British mathematician and code breaker, often credited with shortening World War II — by using math. He was a quantifiable genius. I often confuse him with the always-strapping Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Turing in The Imitation Game — which happens to be the other name for the “Turing Test.” Back in 1950, Turing could see that a time would come when we’d need a crafty way to distinguish between computers and humans. That way we wouldn’t be fooled when computers became more and more powerful. His solution was part thought experiment, part practical test; an interrogator asks questions of another human as well as a computer. And for reasons I can’t fully understand, the end result is an unequivocal distinction between the rote logic of the machine, and the singular intelligence of a human person. Score one for humans!
It should be noted, however, that two short years later, that same singular intelligence would be used by the British government when they found Turing guilty of “gross indecency” (aka homosexuality), sentencing him to chemical castration in the form of estrogen injections.
My own thought experiment — this Substack — is my attempt to take a Whitman Sampler of visual bonbons and spend a finite number of words thinking about what they mean, culturally and personally. As a writer, I’m consumed with words; I hear them, I ingest them, I decipher them in sequences of units – as an ordered code, much like (though with infinitesimal skill) the wartime math heroes like Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. To me, language makes a mental map of its own. Words, when placed in interesting ways, can create a kind of wild scavenger hunt where I — and, when I’m lucky enough to have them, readers — embark on an adventure through time and space and end up in a slightly different place than where I started. But after many years of hyper focus on linguistic integers, I realized that I’ve lost sight along the way. Literally. I’ve been operating like a star-nosed mole; totally in the dark where visual cues are concerned. Feeling my way along with only my whiskers, my visual cortex has shriveled up. The rest of my gray goo has been focused (ala the gray goo himself, Noam Chomksy) only on language in its infinite variety. 2,000 Words has been my way back to the seeing world. It’s forced me to put my readers on for a new purpose — seeing first. Writing second.
A brilliant poet friend of mine recently pointed out that this process is an old one. I mean like almost 3,000 years old. It’s called “ekphrasis.” It’s the act of describing an image using writing, and it was first documented in Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad. In it, Homer spent about 150 lines describing the shield of Achilles. It was a piece of heavy bronze armor, decorated with detailed concentric scenes — gods, domestic life, war, love. The cosmos itself, as well as the everyday world of the ancient Greeks. This great work of art, given to Achilles by his mother, Thetis, and forged by the god Hephaestus, was worthy of its own exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unfortunately, you won’t find it there. Why? Because this particular shield of Achilles never existed. Yes, Homer described it beautifully, but he made it up. Plus, not for nothing, Homer was blind.
He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea's water,
and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness,
and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens,
the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion
and the Bear, whom men give also the name of the Wagon,
who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion
and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean.
- Homer, The Iliad
CAPTCHA is no Achilles Shield, and I’m no Homer. But as an ekphrastic exercise, CAPTCHA does conjure up its own worldview. That is, if I had the capacity to interpret it visually.
At no time in my life have I ever been in such doubt of my powers of perception; CAPTCHA has brought me close to tears more than once. This is why I'm routinely blocked from being reunited with important information: instead of seeing traffic lights, I see a cute yellow convertible. I imagine it’s a summer day, a young couple, in love. They’re on their way to the beach. Maybe they just picked up a cooler full of sandwiches. Not a care in the world. They’ve got the music on, they’re going right on red. They see their friend who drives a yellow cube truck so they wave across the road. An 18-wheeler comes barreling across — their light is green, after all — and whammo. End scene. How many traffic lights was that?
Alan Turing, in his infinite wisdom, knew that computers would outsmart us; he, more than anyone, knew how stupid people can be. Not only did he know that this stupidity would bring about his own destruction, it’s possible he knew that would be the key to telling the difference between computers and humans. His only surprise may have been that his test would last 74 years and counting.
But Turing knew a thing or two more about that “singular” force, which is a nice way to describe diminished human intelligence. When we’re asked to look at things, to point out concrete details — even mildly confusing ones — some humans (me) get immediately distracted. We imagine too many hypotheticals. Another way to say that is we make things up. Homer (in his infinite wisdom) is perhaps the best and oldest example of a true visionary; he created something out of his head that had never existed. He wrote so beautifully about a costume prop forged by a mythical god that archeologists are still looking for it.
Pledging “I’m not a robot” is not necessarily a statement of superiority — even if we believe it to be one of our last human holdouts. I have zero doubt that the most rudimentary AI could decipher which squares contain a traffic light much better than I can. What CAPTCHA does, however, is create a metric for a particular human strength: the ability to interpret. And I don’t mean correctly. We are used to standing on one side of a divide and shaking our fists at the three-headed dog across the way. Then, we do the human thing and figure out a work around. We request a new password. We start over. We dial “zero” when we hear a voice prompt. That indignation always makes for a good story. For now.
I like to imagine that Alan Turing left room for us to fudge these tests, and — therefore — pass. Humans make lousy robots, but we’re good at making stuff up. Whether we see it with our own eyes or not. That is the very flaw that separates us from robots. Did I mention we’re also really bad at remembering passwords?
In the end, the Turing Test will always outsmart us. But we will always have ways. I have no doubt that Homer, if asked to guess which squares contained a traffic light, could have done a perfectly adequate job. But I’d much rather hear him write a poem about it.
Thanks for reading! xox
Kate Captcha