How We’re All Slowly Fixing the World

That up there is a Captcha, if you’ve never seen one before, welcome to the internet, also, how are you even seeing this from your time bubble? Remember to warn people about either Hitler or Micheal Bay depending on the time period from which you’re viewing this.

To the majority of the internet Captchas are nothing more than an inconvenience in between reading My Little Pony fan fiction or posting pictures of famous people’s genitals on Facebook. However, if you’ve used one in the last couple of months you may well have actively made the world a slightly better, more educated and knowledgeable place.

The internet behemoth Google noticed that collectively, people spend thousands of man hours every day solving these and that time was going to waste, until now. As Tech Crunch notes here, Google has been using some of the more blurry images from its street view features as Captchas. Thus serving the dual purpose of hindering Skynet and making sure you can easily find the house of that guy on Craiglist who wants to buy your TV/harvest your organs.

The Google street view car probably knows where you live.

If helping people find the person they want to stalk doesn’t float you boat, Google has also started using Captchas to digitize old copies of the New York Times and the thousands of books it has available on Google books that are either too old, or too valuable to trust to a computer.

So the next time you have to fill in a Captcha, just realize that you could be helping a person from the future deliver a pizza, how rad is that?