You could make the exact same argument about locks (which are trivially defeated) - add up all the time that people spend unlocking doors and I'm sure you'd end

You could make the exact same argument about locks (which are trivially defeated) - add up all the time that people spend unlocking doors and I'm sure you'd end up with a huge amount of time; add up all the money that people spend on locks and keys and I'm sure you'd end up with a huge amount of money. Should we logically conclude that locks are just a giant grift by Big Key? I'm sympathetic to the ickiness of captchas, but the paper never addresses the counterfactual of what might happen if there were no captchas at all.