THE VOIGHT KAMPFF CAPTCHA TEST

Have you ever entered in a CAPTCHA, believing that it was right, only to find that it was actually wrong and in turn question whether you yourself are, in fact, really a robot?

     Okay.

   I'm going to say.... probably not.  However, we've all experienced the nuisance of having to interpret the blurry and scribbled hieroglyphics of a CAPTCHA program at some point in our internet lives.  In the more difficult CAPTCHAs, just entering the correct text can be considered a veritable feat.  But by entering the correct CAPTCHA phase you have successfully proved...to a computer... that you're a human... and not a computer.

          Cool.
               Moving along.

                                          ......Click.  Scroll.  Click-click. Click......


Wait! Before you enjoy your post-CAPTCHA webpage come back here for a sec.

Let's look at this scenario again.  What exactly is going on here?  Why are we doing this test in the first place?  Doesn't this seem a little odd to you?

Well in order to fully understand CAPTCHA it's important that you understand what the acronym stands for, which is:



  BETCHA didn't know that, huh?  Well honestly neither did I, until recently. It sounds so absurd that I still can't read it without thinking that its some kind of joke.  But the Turing Test, created by the brilliant British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing, really does exist.  Turing created the test in order to study artificial intelligence.  A computer, Turing believed, might not be able to "think" like a human (yet), but it could certainly imitate a human very well.  There are a number of variations of the Turing test, but the simplest involve a "judge", a human, and a computer.  In the CAPTCHA version of the Turing test, you are the human, the malicious spam bot is the computer, and the judge is actually the CAPTCHA computer program.  Since the spam bot is unable to replicate the CAPTCHA words, and hopefully you are able to, CAPTCHA realizes that you are in fact a human, and allows you special access to the website you're visiting.

      Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.


 So this isn't truly that odd. This is a simple test after all, or at least it seems to be on the surface, and spam bots can't be all that intelligent.  But think of who is given the responsibility of deciding whether someone is  human? Yeah that's right. A computer. Of course, it's still a computer program created by humans, but what would this test be like in the future once technology has approached human intelligence?


  The answer is... who knows!?


  But this raises my next point. In this futuristic scenario, how would we determine who is human and who is inhuman?  Well this requires us to examine the next logical question which is what does it mean to be human? This is something that Philip K. Dick attempted to answer in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.  In this science fiction novel androids are as intelligent, if not even more intelligent than humans in the the newest Nexus 9 model androids.  So if intelligence can be used to separate humans from androids, what can?

 Instead there is the hypothetical Voight Kampff empathy test.  Even Alan Turing realized how difficult it would be to define what it is to "think", especially in the case of a machine.  Philip K. Dick believed that empathy, rather than intelligence, would give artificial intelligence away. The Voight Kampff test times the dilation of the subject's pupils and blush reflex in response to questions (or statements as the one in the box above) that are intended to produce an emotional bias.

 Well this is the method that Rick Deckard employs in order to hunt down and identify escaped androids in Dick's novel.  But if this emotional test works better than an intelligence or imitation test, then what is empathy? Are machines incapable of empathy due to the fact that they are not human?  What is it about humans that makes humans special in this way?

  These are some of the more nuanced, underlying questions in Philip K. Dick's novel and I'm not sure that he answers any of them at all.  Personally, I don't think that there really is anything special about humans.  (but I don't mean it like that!) It's all about time and evolution.  I am almost certain that machines/androids/you-name-it will be indistinguishable in the future, in all aspects, to humans.  Our current artificial intelligence, *cough* Siri *cough* will be as analogous to the true artificial intelligence of the future as the first single celled organisms on Earth after the primordial soup are to human beings!  

 Seriously.  Though there is quite a gap it is very possible that with more advanced technology, human emotion, even human "irrationality" will be programmable.  Hell, can you imagine purchasing a computer and selecting which random personality you want your computer to have along with however much RAM and etc. you want?  

 This unleashes a slew of other ridiculous seeming ideas that may definitely become a reality in the future!  

 Needless to say that's a lot to worry about, in addition to being excited about.

 Anyway, if this really concerns you, next time you stumble upon a CAPTCHA on a website, I suggest that you kick that spam bots ass, flip the bird to SkyNet (aka Google/Apple/Microsoft), and enter the correct phrase like a real human!

        ........................................ that is, of course, while you get the chance.