>Well, the original purpose was to do OCR for things like the NYTs archives and other libraries. The part where you identify road signs & traffic lights was supposedly to train self driving cars. Now, it's apparently just more analytics & tracking for Google to sell you things.

You seem hung up on the idea of the original purpose being one specific thing. The original purpose was to create a dataset to train AIs, the first adopters were OCR programs and such, but it's not like it was created to only be used for that one thing.