Brain on Fire » Blog feed Tim McCormack says words

Captchas as currency

Automated disclaimer: This post was written more than 15 years ago and I may not have looked at it since.

Older posts may not align with who I am today and how I would think or write, and may have been written in reaction to a cultural context that no longer applies. Some of my high school or college posts are just embarrassing. However, I have left them public because I believe in keeping old web pages alive—and it's interesting to see how I've changed.

In the computer world, the traditional valuable limited resources are time (speed), memory, and storage space. But computers do not stand alone — they are designed to complement the activities that we cannot yet automate, such as creativity, fuzzy analogies, and problem solving, as well as natural language abilities. Our unique abilities and highly optimized brains may one day be harnessed to fight against automation technology. Some day there may be professions There have always been professions that exist because they couldn’t be automated. But these new jobs would exist solely because of technology that attempts to resist automation.

So, what’s it worth to spammers to acquire this rare resource? Would they pay people to interpret captchas? Could they present the captchas on their own automaticity by using humans as a randomizing principle

  • Captchas were designed to save us from repetitive tasks
  • Computers were designed to save us from repetitive tasks
  • Computers were designed to save computers from their own sites, piping the responses right back to the original site? What about manual spam, where people are spamming by hand to gain referrals? (Think about those “Free iPod” pyramid schemes, where each user is required to sign up ten others before getting their prize.)

    So, what’s it worth to spammers to acquire this rare resource? Would they pay people to interpret captchas? Could they present the captchas on their own automaticity by using humans to repetitively perform tasks that are not automatic enough for computers, like decoding captchas

    • Fun!

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