🤖Are you a robot?

You must all be familiar with the above "Are you a robot?" daunting question that makes you swear for a second before visiting a new site.

Thinking back over my life, I must have answered this question the most by a landslide compared to any other question.

Are you a robot? is not a question of whether I am made of electrical circuits or tiny perfect biopolymers. Instead, this question seems to throw me off in an internal monologue, like in the movies when the background fades about away, and just you and your thoughts remain.

Back in the days, salesmen would leave pamphlets in your mail to reach you or, if they were bold enough, knock on your door and have a conversation about the product they are representing. Fast forward to yahoo becoming popular on the internet. The same companies changed tactics and started reaching people via digital mailboxes. Companies took advantage of this easy path to reach people and used computers to generate multiple emails. At this point, an intervention was needed and CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) came into the spotlight. Now, CAPTCHA is more or less a common part of the internet world. It takes about 10 seconds, for a person, to navigate the CAPTCHA system to continue their day. That is enough time to make you stop at the moment.

So, what happens today? You are sharing your screen at a zoom meeting and as soon as you think you are ready to share a website with your audience, "Are you a robot?" shows up on your screen *cue internal screaming*. And the internal monologue begins. Am I? Am I a robot? Maybe I am. I have almost the same schedule every day. I went to graduate school because I enjoy studying and wanted to escape the 9-5 horrifying life. But is doing what I love enough? I do not have the time to commit to other ventures that I dream of at the moment. Am I not like a robot in that sense? Having but one purpose for this stage of life? Is that so bad, I mean robots rarely make mistakes too, right? Anyways, my audience awaits. I check "No" to the question, guess which pictures have a crosswalk in them, and the dial turns. According to the system, I am not a robot, and life goes on and on and on.

CAPTCHA was the result of a Ph.D. student’s creative work. Probably one of the more uncommon results of a Ph.D. More often a Ph.D. work ends up in an internal system somewhere or published articles, that require expensive subscriptions to view, or just sits in the advisor's office where the pages of the dissertation collect dust. If a computer-generated program could replace salesmen to deliver news about products, how long until it catches on to other professions?

I am, in fact, not a robot. Every puzzle I solve to prove I am not a robot shows my ability to understand the information I consume and apply it. With every paper I read in school, with every new nugget of information I consume from my peers and classes, with every mistake I make and rectify, with every new experiment I conduct, I am understanding and applying. Though robots may have all the information, they cannot give information back to the world. It is understanding that leads us to connect information and that is knowledge. This is the edge humans will always have in today’s world. So what’s another CAPTCHA to prove that I am not a robot? I would like to end by asking you, what's your CAPTCHA? What makes you stop during your day and initiates your internal monologue?

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Write of Passage Cohort 8

Write of Passage Cohort 8 with David Perell.