😕 WTH Captcha?

Sure, NYC’s Empire State Building makes a fine list-topper as America’s favorite piece of architecture.

But it ain’t my favorite — that’d be LA’s 2121 Avenue of the Stars, a gleaming 34-story beauty that holds two secrets:

• Its unofficial, fictional name, Nakatomi Plaza (AKA the setting of Die Hard).
• It’s actually pretty empty — it has 186.9k square feet currently for lease.

It isn’t alone on the latter one. In the 10 largest US markets, ~50% of office space sat unoccupied in June, per Investopedia.

We’re in the thick of a commercial real estate crisis — one in desperate need of a hero.

John McClane = housing conversions?

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) lays the groundwork for shifting America’s underutilized office space into much-needed housing supply, per Insider:

• The NBER team found that ~11% of office towers in the 105 most-populous US cities could be converted into residential properties.
• The report outlines 2k+ “zombie” office buildings — empty and unrentable — that could be turned into eco-friendly 200-unit apartment towers.

The best-case scenario would add 400k homes to the market, making a dent in the millions of units needed to steady the housing crisis.

Could it really work?

… Yeah, seems like it. Bringing these zombies back to life could make financial sense:

• It can be cheaper and quicker to retrofit existing structures than to start from scratch, anyway, but 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act also incentivizes green building — if the new homes meet efficiency standards, they could qualify for $10B+ in federal grants.
• The opportunity is particularly massive in NYC, SF, and LA, which have the most towers fitting NBER’s residential conversion criteria — and an insatiable demand for more housing.

The first step: real estate leaders fully accepting that the combo of remote work and high interest rates mean commercial tenants (like, say, the Nakatomi Corp.) aren’t coming back anytime soon.

It’s gotten increasingly harder — weirder — to prove you’re not a robot.

Why? AI trained on the Captchas of yore are able to pass them, per Insider, meaning it’s a constant battle to find a Captcha a human can solve, but a bot can’t.

In 1950…

… Alan Turing created the Turing test. A human evaluator sent the same questions to both a human and a machine, then guessed which answers came from the machine. A machine that tricks evaluators often enough has “passed” the test — but so far, none has.

In 2000, Luis von Ahn — now co-founder and CEO of Duolingo — was inspired by Yahoo’s problem with spammers using bots to sign up for millions of free accounts.

He and mentor Manuel Blum invented the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (Captcha), which required users to decipher distorted letters and numbers. Humans could, bots couldn’t.

But guess what?

Optical character recognition (OCR), which helps digitize text, taught bots to read wonky text. By 2014, Google’s AI could solve text Captchas 99.8% of the time, while humans could only do it 33% of the time.

Captchas evolved, asking users to identify particular images or audio, but AI is getting good at that, too.

And as AI trains itself to generate Captchas, things have gotten weirder. Discord users noticed Captchas full of AI-generated, Cronenberg-esque objects asking them to ID stuff that isn’t even real — e.g., a snail-yoyo thing called a “Yoko,” per Motherboard.

What’s next?

The “I am not a robot” button uses behavior leading up to clicking the button — e.g., browser history, mouse movement — to gauge humanity. Future tech could build on that to create a state of constant surveillance.

But ultimately, as bots get smarter, Captchas will always be lucky to be one step ahead.