Winnograd Schema Challenges would be a step further for these text captchas. They are asking you to identify an ambiguous pronoun in a statement.

Examples:

- The man couldn't lift his son because he was so weak. Who was weak?

- The firemen arrived after the police because they were coming from so far away. Who came from far away?

- The drain is clogged with hair. It has to be [cleaned/removed]. What has to be [cleaned/removed]?

They are crafted in such a way that there are two variants of the challenge every time. Ex: The man couldn't lift his son because he was so heavy. Who was heavy?

I don't know if they are hard to generate automatically. They do require common sense to solve and it's still an open problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge

Yes, that was the idea of reCAPTCHA — give tasks that are hard for computers to do to (several) humans. It started with recognizing words from books that were scanned but where OCR failed.