Latest in a series of thinkings-aloud…
Okay, so I mentioned the literal and symbolic logic of recognition in this part of my Blogtalk paper (which sounds increasingly incoherent each time I reread it), recalling the unusually traumatic difficulty we had with the following kinds of tests in the Storybox blogging project I ran last year with young refugee people:
Such tests are known as CAPTCHAs — “Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and are commonly used by web services that involve social communications, including Blogger, the blogging system we were using. They act as a gateway to prevent inhuman communication, stopping automated scripts from procuring accounts for transmitting spam.
“What does this mean?” the young people would ask me when confronted with an avant garde-looking CAPTCHA. “Why do we have to answer this… question?”
“To… prove that you’re human,” I replied in a whisper, […] realising the gravity of the situation…
And you may recall my recent thoughts on Alan Turing’s original logics of recognition, and the weird links between recognisable gender and the concepts of the human and the artificially intelligent.
Now get this — it’s Chris Hables Gray, in Cyborg Citizen:
The complications of cyborg citizenship call for a cyborg citizen Turing test to determine which entities can actually participate in our discourse community and which cannot.
Cor!
[ tags: alan-turing, artificial-intelligence, CAPTCHA, citizenship ]
As a web accessibility guy, I should point out that CAPTCHAs, being straight image files with no alt attributes, are also pretty good at preventing blind people from communicating.