first, computers are not better at identifying those things than us, our brain evolved for that and it is a massively complex problem for a computer. sure we h

first, computers are not better at identifying those things than us, our brain evolved for that and it is a massively complex problem for a computer. sure we have models that can do it running on server on static images, but the problem they are trying to solve is not street view, the problem is training ML models capable of doing this in real time in an autonomous car. taking a step back, identifying things in images is a problem very complex for a computer, best way in this day and age is to use ML but you need to train it to do it, for that you use a bank of know images and that is what they use reCaptcha for, to built those image banks that they will later use to train and evaluate ML models. Second, they can use reCaptcha for that and still provide all those things that you mentioned. another thing, they are not continuously using the same set trillions of times, they are increasing the image set over time, and this is what they use reCaptcha for to classify those new images, they dump new images in the set and every time you see a reCaptcha it will show you a few know images and a new unknown one that need to be classified. Your input alone say nothing about that image, but after hundreds of peoples saying that, for example, there is a traffic light in a image while getting all the other know traffic light images right indicate there is a big likelihood of that picture containing a traffic light, once they have a big confidence on the image classification after hundreds or even thousands of captcha they move it to the know images set.