Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet

In a few more years there will probably be virtually no human users of web sites and apps. Everything will be through an AI agent mediation layer. Building better CAPTCHAs is interesting technically, but it is doubling down on a failed solution that nobody actually wants. What is needed is an authentication layer that allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with economic incentives to control usage. CAPTCHA has always been an economic bar only, since they are easy to farm out to human solvers, and it is a very low bar. Having an agent API with usage charges is a much better solution because it compensates operators instead of wasting the cost of solving CAPTCHAs. Maybe this will finally be the era of micro payments?

Co-founder of Roundtable here.

I agree that better authentication methods for AI agents are needed. But right now bots and malicious agents are a real problem for anyone running sites with significant traffic. In the long run I don’t think human traffic will go to zero even if its relative proportion is reduced.

> Building better CAPTCHAs is interesting technically, but it is doubling down on a failed solution that nobody actually wants

I want it. I don't want my message boards to be people's AI agents...

Certainly. An authentication layer, and everything else customizable by the user.

The web, HTML that is, is a grammar, an app is a grammar, the buttons of my car are a grammar, I want each grammar served, transformed to my grammar however I like it, probably org-mode file grammar.

I don't want each website's colors, or clickable elements to be determined by any other person than the user. There are themes, I want to select exactly what theme I am browsing the internet today. I also want my fridge to be connected to the internet, accessed using an authentication layer on top of IPv6, and using it's functionality with a grammar.

In other words, the web, browsers, apps and physical buttons will go down the drain soon and they will be replaced by something which can open and manipulate org filetypes.

The web was/is a huge financial bubble anyway, and it will burst quickly when that happens.

In this few years scenario why would there be a need for websites anyway? The bots can just use APIs.

> allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with economic incentives to control usage

There's a huge economy out there based on wasting human time. They explicitly do not want agents acting on behalf of humans, because it means human time is no longer being wasted.

They also don't want to get paid in money, because the money would go to a different profit center. The only payment they accept (because they use that as a metric to justify their salary) is "engagement" aka proof of wasted human time.

Nah. You misunderstood. "They" don't make money on human time wasted. They make money on ads served. They don't particularly care if the ads were served to humans or agents, they get paid either way. Bot-traffic is actually good for tech companies because it inflates numbers. Capthas are not there to waste our time, but are there to improve their credibility ("We are certain those ad-clicks were real humans because the captha said so").