Secondly, If you tell me that one dude [author] ruled the one+ year work of the engineering team at google as a flaw and simplified it as [So what Google is trying to sell us as a comprehensive bot detecting algorithm is simply a whitelist based on your previous online behavior, CAPTCHAs you solved.] and that you believe it, I would question your intelligence.
This is supposed to be tech savvy community at least to some degree, what the fuck.
Now, in the google's blogpost it reads [Advanced Risk Analysis backend for reCAPTCHA that actively considers a user’s entire engagement with the CAPTCHA—before, during, and after—to determine whether that user is a human.]
[However, CAPTCHAs aren't going away just yet. In cases when the risk analysis engine can't confidently predict whether a user is a human or an abusive agent, it will prompt a CAPTCHA to elicit more cues, increasing the number of security checkpoints to confirm the user is valid.]
So my guess would be they analyze users behaviour on the page where captcha is located, things like mouse movements, time it takes to type out the words, spelling mistakes corrected and whatever else humans do differently than bots - and only then combine that with your historical cookies. Maybe it is much more complicated than that, I, as well as you, don't know the details.
Do you really think that they would go ahead and implement a such system without rigorous testing of effectiveness? I am sure that they tested it extensively with users, AND with bots, and decided that it is better than the current system, and ONLY then deployed it. Rant off.