Yep. Computers are just binary-state machines. Everything you can do with a computer, you could do with water channels and pulleys and gates (if you could assemble trillions and trillions of them). No one would ask whether the water-channel system 'groks' things, but because they are miniaturized and (to 99.9999% of people) esoteric in their actual workings, people treat them like magic.

Clarke was right, but sadly it doesn't take alien technology for people to start anthropomorphizing computers or thinking that they magically have transcended mere (though obviously very complexly-arranged) logic gates, it just takes a GUI that spits out algorithmically-generated pictures and text.