alt Hacker NewsThe Turing test was also never meant to be taken so seriously. It's not a rigorous statement of anything.
Situations like this are precisely why academics tend to avoid the spotlight. You say one slightly off thing and your perceived authority echoes forever with the intellectually lazy.
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> The Turing test was also never meant to be taken so seriously.
citation needed. It has been used as a rubicon for a long time. Ever since Eliza, at least. And there were big headlines and lots of talk around the time LMs became "good enough". I specifically remember when someone had a test done around "a teenager talking in a different language" or somesuch, claiming it was the first time the test was passed.
It is pretty normal that once it was unquestionably "passed", lots of people started claiming it wasn't even that big of a deal. Tesler's theorem and all that.
And even if you think the specific formulation of Turing isn't that important (and I'd somewhat agree), you can still use the concept to look at other things. Imagine asking a mathematician 5 years ago the chances of a Erdos problem being solved by a computer end to end. Or a millennium prize. Or ask a swe if a repo could be generated by a computer from the input "write a mario style game", or any other examples of proven expertise.
Yes, the Turing test has been misunderstood for a long time. Turing published it, though - it wasn't some offhand comment he made and it wasn't intellectually lazy.