Except for the fact that humans are solving them, only getting paid for solving them and rendering said captchas effectively redundant. The key term here is isolation, where rather than captchas serving to hurt flow states, they are isolated away and offloaded more comfortably to the solvers who are happy to solve them in return for a reasonable fee. Google's new system is a bit more robust however and uses fingerprinting. One could argue that fingerprinting is more nefarious than letting people have a small income from captcha solving. On the subject of Google's fingerprinting http://blog.higg.so/2015/02/24/googles-new-captcha-security-...