I think Turing's idea was profound and prescient honestly. The reason he put emphasis on deception and imitation in the test is because he wanted to know whether we had build a thinking machine, or just a tool. As you say, superhuman intelligent computers are not like humans and it's indeed not right to require that from them if we just want to build a knowledge repository. But if you want to know whether we've build a mind, his conception matters. To deceive, you have to have the imagination of what it's like to be you imagining what it's like to be me. You need a model of someone's cognition and your own, in real time while you interact with the world. And just architecturally that's not the case with LLM's. They don't have cognitive processes going on as they're interacting with you, they can't even in theory beat this.

It's actually scary to me just how smart Turing was because he immediately recognized, at a time when computers barely existed, that the real test isn't if a machine can play smart but if it can play dumb. Because that eliminates all the parlor tricks and requires actual reflection. Just mind blowing to anticipate that in 1950.

You are making the mistake of confusing a mind with a human mind… a vastly different type of mind should not be expected to be good at everything we are good at, even if generally far more intelligent. I think people generally make the same mistake with discounting the more intelligent animals by focusing on their inability to act human, and ignoring or not noticing that they can do things we are incapable of- like a dog navigating a home in total darkness from scent alone- turning scents drifting in the air into visual/spacial type data is a complex task.

A human mind, for example is not sufficiently generally intelligent to convincing mimic even a fish mind- we cannot generally emulate minds structured differently either. Even an actual human mind with vastly different experiences- simulated perfectly in a computer or even just a regular person from a very different culture will fail your concept of the turing test, because our mind is shaped by our experiences.

Also, I think your conception of LLM limitations is mistaken. We don’t fully understand them in theory- but I think the way to think of LLMs is that they are a world model able to simulate almost any scenario if setup properly. They are not themselves a mind, but if sufficiently good, they will reliably simulate minds. Noam Chomsky published an article arguing how LLMs were incapable even in theory of doing things GPT4, which was released shortly after his article can do- showing that either his model of what they are, or of what is required for those tasks is mistaken .