CAPTCHA

You’ve probably been faced with a Captcha in the last few days. The annoying 4×4 grid requiring you to “select all squares with traffic lights”. You question whether the pole counts and pray as you click verify.

Why are so many of the human verification tests traffic based? You’re unknowingly programming the self-driving vehicles of the future. Give yourself a pat on the back, you already contributed to Google Books and Google Street View when the grid displayed hard to read words and street numbers in yesteryear.

One of the most significant difficulties with AI is the massive amount of human-labelled data it needs to function. 25% of time spent on machine learning projects is in data labelling. Outsourcing and paying workers to sit and label images is one way to do it, but companies are harnessing the globe’s 4 billion internet users to speed up the process.

Google’s Waymo is focused on creating the best self-driving technology, owning Captcha and the world’s biggest search engine helps that become a reality. The company has already launched a driverless, ride-hailing app in Phoenix.