The Penalty of Being Human

Each year, three people die waiting for Cloudflare and Google to verify they are human.

If you browse the web, you have likely come across these delightful little Cloudflare speed bumps:

If you are lucky, you can click the box and move on. If not, you have to complete a few CAPTCHAs that sometimes end in endless loops. And then there’s Google’s own reCAPTCHA:

These browser checks supposedly protect websites from DDoS attacks or block bots from scraping content. Too bad that nowadays AIs are better at image CAPTCHAs than humans, thanks to humanity wasting years of its collective life training these AIs to surpass them in a capability no one needed or wanted.

So, we are penalized for being human to protect websites. Can’t we punish bots for not being human, instead?

On any given day, I see maybe 5–10 of these as I research various topics. I tend to rely heavily on tools such as FastGPT and archive.today, which often trigger these (re)CAPTCHAs. That means in any given year, I see more than 3,000 of these time sinks. If each takes me only a second to deal with (including page load interruption), that’s nearly an hour of my life down the drain every year waiting for Cloudflare to confirm what I already know: I am a human.

Let’s scale that up. There are 5.56 billion people online. If each of them is delayed by just one second per year, that’s 176 years of collective time wasted annually. That’s the equivalent of nearly three full lives, sacrificed to CAPTCHAs.

Thanks, Cloudflare.