CAPTCHAs are a time-worn way for humans to tell computers that we are human. They are those little boxes filled with distorted text that we've been told humans can decipher, but computers—the bad guys' computers—cannot. So, Watson-be-damned, we enter the letters and gain access to whatever is behind the veil, leaving the bad bots steaming outside the pearly, CAPTCHA'd gates. As Google's ReCAPTCHA website puts it: "Tough on bots, easy on humans."

It is a satisfying display of human superiority built into the daily experience of the web. And, BONUS, you're often helping do optical character recognition on old books at the same time. Take that, Machines, you don't even have any books.

But then along comes Google today noting, in a showily short and breezy blog post, that their machines can beat ReCAPTCHAs 99% of the time.

"Turns out that this new algorithm can also be used to read CAPTCHA puzzles—we found that it can decipher the hardest distorted text puzzles from reCAPTCHA with over 99 percent accuracy," writes Google product manager Vinay Shet. "This shows that the act of typing in the answer to a distorted image should not be the only factor when it comes to determining a human versus a machine."