alt Hacker NewsThis no news for people who study philosophy, as it was known since the 1980s when John Searle described the Chinese room thought experiment.
Even Turing him self did envision the Turing test as something to pass as intelligence, but rather as a more useful replacement for the troubled term.
That said, I think your quest is doomed. There will never be a superior human-like intelligence. Forever is a long time, but my reasoning for believing this is the same reason Turing offered a replacement. Intelligence is way too vague to be useful as a measurement for anything. And if we ever discover something that is more intelligent them humans (by whichever definition of intelligence) we will simply redefine intelligence to exclude that.
The Searle's Chinese room thought experiment usually reveals more about those who think it rules out a machine intelligence than it does about AI.
It rests on a staunch unwillingness to even consider the possibility that a computational process encode intelligence and reasoning, in favour of looking for the intelligence in the medium the computation runs on, and going "a-ha!" when there is nothing that looks intelligent there.
I agree with you that there will certainly be people who just continuously redefine the words to avoid accepting that AI is intelligent or reasoning, exactly for that reason - people have avoided pinning down an objective, measurable definition of these terms for a very long time, at least in part because it leads to some very uncomfortable discussions.
In particular how to define them so that they don't exclude an uncomfortable proportion of humans, but at the same time won't include entities people don't want to include (be it certain animals, or AI)
To a lot of people, the notion that there isn't a clear binary divide between human and non-human is deeply disconcerting.