There is no evil like reCAPTCHA
Google did not create reCAPTCHA. They bought it; it was started by Luis von Ahn, who went on to create Duolingo.<p>When reCAPTCHA was created, the alternative was CAPTCHA, which tried to impede bots but did not generate any social benefit. This was the genius of the original reCAPTCHA concept: the time taken to 'confirm humanity' could be channeled into the socially-useful endeavor of digitizing books.  Capture some of the heat emissions of impeding bots for a useful purpose, rather than letting it all go to waste.<p>Now, yes, Google is using it to train their self-driving car AI, and there's a bunch else happening in it to connect to Google's surveillance apparatus. There's much to legitimately criticize there.  I personally don't view training Google's proprietary AI as the same kind of intrinsically altruistic purpose as digitizing the world's pre-digital books.<p>But putting the entire concept on blast with erroneous history that can be corrected with about 60 seconds on Wikipedia doesn't help the argument at all.