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Notes -
In hindsight it was a big mistake to think of the Turing Test as a fixed-difficulty challenge outputting a binary "yes this passes" or "no this doesn’t".
If we'd instead reified the idea of "a Turing test of length X" outputting "this passes Y% of the time", then by now we'd have graphs of "in year Z the state-of-the-art pass rate was Y(X,Z)" and a much better idea of where (and if...) our current architectures' scaling was going to plateau.
Maybe not so much a mistake, rather an idea being limited due to it being new and there not being any way to try to put it into practice yet.
I tend to think the biggest issue is the huge variance in human intelligence. There are already mental hospitals and insane asylums full of people who just can't handle the real world at all. Millions of humans can't write down their thoughts coherently. A ChatGPT-4 level model programmed to pretend to be human could probably already seem smarter and more human than some fraction of the present human population. Especially if whoever is judging has not been primed to think that the thing they're communicating with might not be an actual human being.
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