Google Is Using Us to Train Their Self Driving Cars
Why reCAPTCHA is doing more than you think
If you use the internet, you would have, at one point, done a reCAPTCHA. Developed as a project by Luis von Ahn and Ben Maurer, it’s a CAPTCHA system that enables websites and software the ability to distinguish between humans and bots, which Google ended up acquiring in 2009.
There have been a couple of versions since the original release, with earlier ones focusing on deciphering the hard-to-read text. More recent versions have focused on identifying specific objects like cars and buses.
If you’ve forgotten what the older versions looked like, here’s an example:
It’s public knowledge the original CAPTCHA was used to help digitize books
Of course, the original intent was to keep spammers and bots away, but it also had an alternative purpose. The internet archive had over 200 000 scanned copies of books, yet at the time, there were no indexable digitized versions of these books (with some books having fancy writing).
To help index these, would have required millions of human hours to help do this. This is where CAPTCHAs came in.
