You can blame a lack of metaphysical sophistication for this and a lack of self-awareness around how "intelligence" is being projected or read into things.
One obvious feature of intelligence is that it can abstract from particulars. We form and reason about universal concepts. I know the concept of "squarishness" which means something definite without being some specific square (of which there is an infinite number). I can imagine a square, but those are always particular squares, whereas the concept is universal. But material things are only ever particular. Can you show me a material thing that is "squarishness"? No. Computers are physical objects, right? So how can the universal "squarishness" exist in a physical object without being a particular square?
Even here we often fool our selves when we fails to recognize that computer programs, like the text in a book, need humans to grant them their identity and make sense of them because their meaning and identity are assigned by the observer and not intrinsic to them like mind-independent things. A "Square" class, defined as record with two fields corresponding to width and length, is not the concept of a square. Instances of that class are not squares. Even "class" and "instance" are mental models which do not exist "out there" like real entities or phenomena. What we call computers just have affordances that allow us to configure them to correspond and cooperate with the models in our minds. But strictly speaking, computers don't really have an objective reality and neither does the computation within them. The machine is real in the sense that we have arranged a bunch of stuff to be a certain causal ensemble, but this causal ensemble is not objectively a computer nor is it computing. Rather, we are using it to compute. But if you erased all human beings from the planet, and left a bunch of computers running, objectively, they would only be arrays of things with magnetic and electrical components changing physical state. You need someone to interpret what computers do to make them useful. Just like three beads on an abacus doesn't mean "3" and pushing a bead toward those three doesn't mean "adding 1". You need a person to assign those meanings to it. Computers don't magically break free of that reality.