The common thread is materialism. If you don't introduce any mystical entities such as a soul, it is inevitable that it's possible to construct something that operates indistinguishably from what we consider natural life - it's a question of engineering and biological research at that point. The question of whether it's 100 years removed from my laptop, or 1000 years, is a completely different one. It took humans literally millennia to get from horses to cars, yet both are on the same spectrum.

The Chinese Room argument essentially tries to make a point that it's impossible at any level of complexity. The only way that can be true is if you reject materialism entirely, and adopt the notion that there's something else that "bestows" intelligence on a brain, that cannot be replicated by any artificial physical means (but is somehow still replicated in utero). It's not really a verifiable claim, which is evident from the very design of the experiment - it says that there are things that appear intelligent to any possible test, but still aren't, because common sense, essentially.