The above poster doesn't say that Google invented recaptcha, only that their use of it to have humans clean street view data is very Googly.

The original recaptcha was only text from book digitization projects.

The original pre-Google reCAPTCHA was used for digitizing books. Using it to read house numbers for Street View was a Google addition.

The original inventor also went on to found Duolingo, which uses teaching someone a language as a way to translate web pages as a service. I like that model a lot more, as at least you get something in exchange (the language learning)

(am google)

To be fair, if you use google maps, and don't have any ethical issues with helping googler, you do get a return on investment, in that you get improved ML capabilities and improved address recognition in google maps.