Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't? I always suspected the electoral majority is not particularly bright (which sort of contradicts the idea of near-100 being an average IQ nevertheless) but if this is "unusually smart" then things feel really creepy.
And it makes sense.
Statistically, an IQ of 100 is the population median, meaning, assuming a Gaussian repartition (which it usually is for human traits), that's about 10% of people scoring around 80 or lower.
To give an idea of what level of intelligence this means, we can wonder what that kind of people cannot do?
In the US, the military don't do a systematic IQ test for recruitment, but when they did one, it was deemed illegal to induct any one if they possessed an IQ less than or equal to 81.
That means 1 person out of 10 is not intelligent enough to be in the lowest rank in the army.
It's not far fetched to think of the possibility that some functioning members of society are not capable of solving mental problems most humanity think are trivial.
In fact, that are also trivial for AI, although we may all end up to fall into that basket one day or the other.
One of the brightest, quickest witted people I know experiences significant dyslexia and dyscalculia. She would fail at this and it would make her quietly angry at you for making her go through it.
I also know someone with a vision disorder who would struggle.
Hell, when I am tired, I would have to close one eye to pass -- I have this issue with quite a lot of captchas, and I am not legally vision-impaired. And I would be angry at the developer for making me struggle.
Furthermore, I think in a world with an ageing population it might be worth considering that puzzles like this are a bit like early dementia tests. It's worth thinking what data gets collected when the world is asked to perform brainteasers to gain access to essential functions.
I have met a few, yes, including people who are intellectually limited (colloquially called "dumb"), people who were born or acquired mental handicaps, people who are suffering most likely suffering from dyscalculia (dyslexia for arithmetic/numbers). E.g. we think my grandma might have had a milder form of the latter, as she had a lot of trouble adding up numbers in particular, which would have made this CAPTCHA very hard for her - but not impossible. And a friend of my mom has Turner syndrome, which is linked to dyscalculia, and she is indeed very bad at basic math.
Among people, who aren't straight up unable due to handicaps, who couldn't solve them? It seems easy enough that mostly anyone could.
They are quite common problems with a wide spectrum of severity.
Back when you could take your car to a local garage, your car would very likely be repaired by a very clever person who was dyslexic (even dyscalculate) because as a career, men in particular who struggled with written language (or even modestly complex maths -- differential gear yes, differential equation no) could do it and thrive at it.
Should that person be treated as handicapped if they need to fill in a form? Or should forms not be designed to make people waste their time with puzzles or kafkaesque processes of any kind?
Regardless of the answer to that, it focuses on the wrong problem.
The problem is the user-hostile concept of captchas in the first place. Imagine going to a brick and mortar store (or travel agency) and being forced to solve some ridiculous puzzle to be allowed inside to do a transaction.
It's not ok in physical life, it's not ok on a commerce website.
Incidentally, how old are you, and do you have any involvement with IT hiring?
Coming back to the topic, it’s interesting how this IQ cliff seems to exclusively affect ICs in IT, while somehow spares all of the middle and upper management, that all seems to be on top of their compensation game as they gracefully age ever so upwards in titles.
Certainly, when I read this I immediately thought of three.