In the course of the past week, I am willing to bet that you have been asked by a machine to show that you are human.

One website or two is bound to have ordered you to “prove that you are not a robot”, making you decipher letters and numbers, or choose all the pictures in a grid that feature traffic lights. Some tests can be frustrating when you simply cannot make out the squiggly text on the screen, or fail to correctly identify all traffic lights. But even as the blood of your humanity boils with rage, you must persevere with the test or the machine will not accept that you are human.