I recently read this brilliant comic by Zach Weinersmith at SMBC. And the first thought I had was this "has to be the most foolproof way there exists to prove yourself human"

Seriously, I am tired of proving to Google that I'm human by selecting grids with zebra crossings in them. This task has to be a lot easier for bots than it is for me because I suck at it every time.

I think, maybe, just maybe we need some other ways to test if users online are humans. Just test us for what we suck at.

  1. Keep showing us optical illusions and check how we freak out. Our eyes keep making a fool of our minds and we let them. Of course, we are already being crazies by training computers to fall for optical illusions. Why, why?
  2. Show us a street full of people coughing and sneezing around openly and ask a single question "what's the risk that you will get coronavirus if you walk out on this street without a mask?" Apparently, no human will say 100%.
  3. Show the departure time of the flight. Show us the distance to the airport, the traffic en route. Ask us then when should we leave the house. Bots will always make us reach in time. Humans, on the other hand, will be either too early or too late, even when provided with all the data.
  4. Show us a video of people playing basketball and make us count the passes. Then just make us randomly predict when will the pandemic end. If a user selects "before August starts", has to be Human. Yeah, and also show us next the walking, chest-thumping gorilla that we missed in the video.
  5. Just put a simple multiple-choice question, "What will you name some random street?" with one of the options as "I don't know… name it whatever the fuck man". Majority humans apparently will select that.

You get the idea. Don't judge us by our smartness. If there's anything that the last few months have proven, it is that we ain't an intelligent species. It is our dumbness, our frailties that make us humans now.