Hmm ... that and a la shminux's xkcd link gives me an idea for a test protocol: instead of having the judges interrogate subjects, the judges give each pair of subjects a discussion topic a la Omegle's "spy" mode:
Spy mode gives you and a stranger a random question to discuss. The question is submitted by a third stranger who can watch the conversation, but can't join in.
...and the subjects have a set period of time they are permitted to talk about it. At the end of that time, the judge rates the interesting-ness of each subject's contribution, and each subject rates their partner. The ratings of confirmed-human subjects would be a basis for evaluating the judges, I presume (although you would probably want a trusted panel of experts to confirm this by inspection of live results), and any subjects who get high ratings out of the unconfirmed pool would be selected for further consideration.
So the Turing test has been "passed", and the general consensus is that this was achieved in a very unimpressive way - the 13 year old Ukrainian persona was a cheat, the judges were incompetent, etc... These are all true, though the test did pass Turing's original criteria - and there are far more people willing to be dismissive of those criteria in retrospect than were in advance. It happened about 14 years later than Turing had been anticipating, which makes it quite a good prediction for 1950 (in my personal view, Turing made two mistakes that compensated - the "average interrogator" was a much lower bar than he thought, but progress on the subject would be much slower than he thought).
But anyway, the main goal now, as suggested by Toby Ord and others, is to design a better Turing test, something that can give AI designers something to aim at, and that would be a meaningful test of abilities. The aim is to ensure that if a program passes these new tests, we won't be dismissive of how it was achieved.
Here are a few suggestions I've heard about or thought about recently; can people suggest more and better ideas?
My current method would be the lazy one of simply typing this, then waiting, arms folded:
"If you want to prove you're human, simply do nothing for 4 minutes, then re-type this sentence I've just written here, skipping one word out of 2".