I Spent Forty Minutes Proving to a Machine That I Was Still Alive

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Old Grey Thinker article image

A machine asked me to prove I was alive.

Not in the grand philosophical sense. It wanted a code.

I stood there with my reading glasses in one hand and a document in the other, trying to convince a screen that I existed. The screen did not care. Screens rarely do.

That is the bit older people recognise. Not the technology, exactly. The assumption built into it. If you are slower, cautious, or unwilling to surrender every private detail to a portal designed by someone who thinks contrast is optional, you become the problem.

The full piece is on Substack: I Spent Forty Minutes Proving to a Machine That I Was Still Alive.

The wider library is here: The Old Grey Thinker Library.

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