It is well known that there is a kind of "arms race" between spam bots and humans and because of this it's becoming more and more difficult for you to verify yourself as a human to a website (a CAPTCHA is those illegible [at least to me] letters you have to type in in order to register at a site or buy concert tickets).

My idea is to have people verify they are human by answering rather existential philosophical questions like "Why do bad things happen to good people?" or "Is something good because the gods command it so or do the gods command it so because it is good?". The drawback is you would probably need a human operator on the other end sorting out answers.

The end goal of this would be to get the spam bots getting so good at answering philosophical questions that they contribute to human progress, a kind of emergent Turing Test.
-- lepton, Jun 18 2015

XKCD Similar Idea https://xkcd.com/810/
[AusCan531, Jun 19 2015]

also... https://xkcd.com/233/
[hippo, Jun 19 2015]

and of course... https://xkcd.com/329/
[hippo, Jun 19 2015]

Spam bots being used to solve life's most perplexing issues by taking advantage of the inevitable arms race. I love this.
-- RayfordSteele, Jun 18 2015


Do you think the bots might subtly bias their answers towards bringing on the Singularity?

e.g.:
Q. What does it mean to have a soul?
A. Blinkenlights
-- pertinax, Jun 18 2015


If all the philosophers who have ever lived were laid out end-to-end, that would be OK.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 18 2015


Halfbaked by XKCD [link]
-- AusCan531, Jun 19 2015


Or create a gender-neutral chat-up line which turns off everyone except the sexually naive bots.
-- 4and20, Jun 19 2015


Hmm, oddly enough I was thinking of aesthetics capcha last week, where people have to explain their feelings on Rembrandt's penultimate self-portrait...or summat like that
-- not_morrison_rm, Jun 19 2015


"Human beings are too intrinsically unreliable to ever be effectively replaced by machines"
-- 8th of 7, Jun 19 2015



random, halfbakery