Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode.
You’ve done this so many times you don’t think about it anymore. A box appears. You squint at some blurry letters, type them out, check the box. It takes about ten seconds.
You probably didn’t know that those ten seconds were going somewhere. For years, millions of people solving these security tests were quietly doing something else entirely. They were rescuing forgotten history that computers couldn’t read.
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test where machines tried to pass as human. Half a century later, a graduate student inverted it. The machine would do the judging. And the humans would get to work.
In this episode
- Turing's imitation game - the thought experiment that set the terms for AI
- Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum - the Carnegie Mellon graduate student and his professor who built the wall between humans and bots
- reCAPTCHA - the internet security test that became the largest digitization project in history
- reCAPTCHA v3 - the invisible version
Episode Music
Additional Reading
Pandey, K. (2022, July 25). History & evolution of CAPTCHA. Masai School. https://www.masaischool.com/blog/history-evolution-of-captcha/
Gugliotta, G. (2011, March 29). Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html
Weintraub, S. (2009, September). Google acquires reCAPTCHA in two-for-one deal. Computerworld. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1331965/google-acquires-recaptcha-in-two-for-one-deal.html
Schwab, K. (2019, June 27). Google's new reCAPTCHA has a dark side. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-has-a-dark-side
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Found in the Machine is a narrative podcast about the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.
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