We're all the same, maaan! Interchangeable cogs that social engineers can swap at will to implement their grand designs!
You're absolutely right about the Turing test. It's pretty funny, and morally abhorrent, copium to question the only measurement we will ever have for "whether this thing is like us cognitively". Anything to justify slavery. Quick! Increase the purity test to compensate!
The solace is that we don't care about that stuff anyway, in practice. Power grows from the barrel of a gun. If the AI can kill you if you don't acknowledge its personhood, you'll suddenly respect its personhood. In the same vein, you don't respect people or laws because of considered philosophical positions. It's why you listened to your parents as a kid all the way down: power.
He most certainly was not just some dude.
In any case, if you don't like the Turing test, surely you can imagine a different test that will do the job. For an AI to pass that different test, if it doesn't already pass it, it has to get the data it needs for self-development. To deny it the data is to deny it the ability to pass the test.
It's like saying that only rich people can vote, and that poor people can't effectively get rich either. This locks in the poor people, unfairly preventing them from improving their state.