Google Replaces CAPTCHA With reCAPTCHA, A More Effective Way To Decide Who Is Human

If you've ever signed up for anything online, you've probably taken a CAPTCHA test, an automated test to distinguish humans from machines. Click on all the images that contain a stop sign, check the boxes that show cats. But as Jacob Goldstein from our Planet Money podcast reports, the designers of the test have a problem. Machines are getting so smart that they'll soon be better than humans at passing the test. JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: The most popular version of the I-am-not-a-robot test is made by Google. And the engineer who runs Google's reCAPTCHA team is named Aaron Malenfant One day a few years ago, he was telling his boss about all the things his team was trying to do to stay ahead of the machines.