More from the OpEd...

... Are you a robot? Google really, really wants to know.

The answer to this question is demanded of web users 200 million times a day via CAPTCHAs -- "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," a system owned and operated by Google.

Google got into the CAPTCHA game in 2009 when it acquired a small company founded by Carnegie Mellon University eggheads called reCAPTCHA. And Google's intentions for the technology were brilliant.

Google wanted CAPTCHAs to test whether users were human or bots to protect websites from spam and fraud " but with a twist. Google intended to substitute the original, deliberately distorted letters (readable by people but not bots) with accidentally distorted ones -- ambiguous scans from the Google Books Library Project. For example, if most users identified a blurry letter as an "E," that would be confirmed or corrected in the digital book scan.

The vision for this project was to get the world's web users to work for free, identifying letters while also thwarting malicious bots. Google later used reCAPTCHA for human identification of ambiguous Street View and Maps photographed objects, including home addresses, street signs, and business names and addresses. More recently, Google has used reCAPTCHA to support its broader AI initiatives across maps, computer vision, speech recognition, and security. ...

While using reCAPTCHA v2 has clear benefits, new events this month radically changed the cost-benefit analysis.

AI defeats reCAPTCHA

Researchers from ETH Zurich published a research paper Sept. 13 demonstrating that it can solve Google's reCAPTCHA v2 with 100% accuracy. ...