Do you know you are training Google self-driving cars so they don’t kill people? Yes, by solving captcha

Every time you solve Google– supplied Captcha — and Google supplies this Captcha on thousands of popular websites — you teach Google’s driverless cars. Of course, you don’t probably know that. But have you ever wondered why for the last two odd years, increasingly the Captcha that you are solving on file-sharing websites involves identifying cars in tiny pixelated images, or recognising fire hose, or store fronts, or bicycles, or buses? This is not random. It’s by design because Google wants you to identify these images so that its artificial intelligent systems can learn from your knowledge…

A brief history of captcha
Captcha was not always used the way we remember it now. It was introduced in early 2000s by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, lead by computer scientist researcher Luis Von Ahn or Big Lou, and the idea was to filter out spam bots that were pretending to be real people.
More>>