The entire point of a captcha is to determine if the user is human by requiring a task that is difficult for automated systems to do quickly and reliably. Spammers are sophisticated and well funded. At very least they have a couple high end gaming rigs. (What else would you do with all that spam money?)
As of the writing of this post, Google’s image captcha asks users to identify photos of cars. This means that a dude sitting on top of four TITAN XP’s and three standard deviations of IQ can’t make a program to identify photos of cars faster than a six year old trying to play some cheesy Android game.
So what then of Google’s “autonomous” cars? They are powered, effectively, by just one of those TITAN’s. Maybe a bit more. Definitely not four of them. Safe driving requires you to identify cars, above all things, nearly immediately. Compared to driving, captchas allow veritable eternities to identify a photo. Never mind the car needs to do other things with that chip too.
Still want to take a ride in one of those things?
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A key notable difference is that the captchas are used to train said autonomous vehicle in the first place. A neural network is improved as the number of labeled inputs goes up, and captchas are used by Google to provide massive swathes of reasonably reliable labels for various images.
While an antagonist could potentially train their own neural network to accurately identify pictures of cars and whatnot to defeat Google’s captchas, my only response to that would be a quote from XKCD 810: Mission Fucking Accomplished.