New Delhi, July 6 -- Somewhere on the internet right now, a human being is being asked to prove that she is human. She squints at a grid of blurred photographs, hunts for crosswalks and traffic lights, and clicks until a machine is satisfied that she is not one.

We barely notice how strange this small ritual is. Alan Turing's test asked whether a machine could pass for a human. We have quietly inverted it: now the human performs her humanity for the machine's approval.

I was reminded of this by a fine recent essay in the Financial Times by Sarah O'Connor, 'The human brain is not a machine' (16 June 2026). She traces the long temptation to see the brain as a kind of computer-Marvin Minsky's "meat machines," the older image of an enchante...