First off, I would feel very uncomfortable contradicting Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Bill Joy in one fell swoop. Who am I to judge, though. Argument from authority can be fallacious, sure, so let's not go there.
Think about this for a minute. By the same argument you're taking, we are just lumps of organic molecules replicating with DNA, surely we can't feel anything, right? The thing you're not considering here is emergent behaviour.
Now, you haven't talked about self-programming machines in your article, and I'm pretty sure that's what all the really smart people you've rebuked in your subtitle are scared of. Do a quick Google search for "self-programming" AND "machine learning" AND "genetic". If you've read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, you should be getting goosebumps right about now. If not, and are interested in AI in any way, I cannot stress hard enough how badly you need to go out and get that book.
I was also surprised to see you didn't include Nick Bostrom's book called Superintelligence (2014) in your quotes. If you haven't check it out, I would highly recommend it. It goes deep and wide into how a sudden, exponentially growing spike of machine intelligence could impact our society.