I feel like you didn't read the article, because the author already addresses what you said and had you read the article you'd realize you made incorrect assumptions that, again, he already addressed.
I disagree: "The capatchas were not only difficult for a computer to read, but impossible for a human." He goes on to quote that computers can guess capatchas at 10%. My point is that if you understand capatchas, you can get them right almost all of the time. (Not talking about the audio ones here, since the visual ones seemed to be the focus of the article.)
I understand captchas and so does the original article writer (if you read the article he clearly explains how reCAPTCHA works). While I would have agreed with you a couple of years ago, the author's point that reCAPTCHA has reached a point where it isn't working nearly as well is spot on. I myself fail on them about 75% of the time now -- quickly approaching the failure rate of computers.
For reCAPTCHA it used to be close to 100% success for me, but something has certainly changed with them, I don't know if it was intentional or is the result of a dwindling data set and as an end user, it doesn't matter, what matters is that they are really difficult to solve now.
