The Genius Move of Leveraging 750 Million Internet Users to Digitize Books with Captcha

There’s this little thing called a Captcha, right? You’ve definitely seen it if you’ve spent more than five minutes online in the past decade. It’s that box that pops up asking you to prove you’re not a robot by deciphering and typing out some twisted, barely legible words. Annoying? Maybe. Genius? Absolutely.

Here’s the deal: Captchas were created to differentiate between humans and bots on websites, basically serving as a digital “Keep Out” sign for automated nuisances trying to spam or hack their way through the internet. With around 200 million captchas being solved daily by the mid-2000s, that’s a ton of human brainpower being tapped into for what seems like a trivial task. We’re talking millions of minutes spent every day just to say, “Yes, I’m not a robot.”

Enter Luis Von Ahn, one of the masterminds behind the original Captcha, who had a lightbulb moment. In a TEDx talk that’s nothing short of inspiring, he shared how he saw all this human effort as a golden opportunity to tackle a monumental task: digitizing every book ever. Thus, reCaptcha was born.