Watch A Robot Defeat An 'I Am Not A Robot' Captcha

Technology can advance so incrementally that we're not always aware that it has carried us into a new age. Only in retrospect could we see what a huge difference things like transistors and microprocessors and fiber-optics would have on our lives. Even when an invention seems promising, we don't know for sure whether it will have an impact on the world until a few years have passed.

The question here is: Are we witnessing one of those sea-change moments in a 30-second YouTube vid with some cheesy graphics thrown in at the end? It's entirely possible. We might not know for sure for some time, but there's every possibility that this a crucial link in a long chain of robotics. Decide for yourself.

You can hardly do anything on the internet these days without encountering a CAPTCHA.

The little puzzles are designed to protect websites from bots and slow down the spread of spam – that's where they get their name from (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

So it's a bit concerning to see a robot actually defeat one and successfully pretend to be a human.

That's exactly what this googly-eye robot did, using a stylus on a MacBook Air's trackpad.

Most of the time I can't even make out what a CAPTCHA wants from me, but the CAPTCHA in question here requires a check mark in the box, made with the stylus. You might think that beyond a googly-eyed robot's capabilities, but you'd be wrong.

Not only does the robot manage to make a perfect check mark, it puts the check mark right in the middle of the box, inside the lines.

A perfect landing, and it celebrates with a mic drop. There's clearly some clever engineering behind this robot.

Watch the whole sequence below!

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