I've also heard Cory Doctorow recently offer a similarly dismissive view, describing AI as "just statistics".
Well, AI partisans have applied grandiose terms like "thinking," "intelligence," and "soul" to these machines. It's not wrong to push back and remind people what they really are.
So I guess we all agree, except that some people think "just statistics" is derogatory phrasing!
Admittedly I'm an absolute layman just dabbling in this, but I could find not a single concept that cannot be traced to statistical origins. Like, symbols are essentially "vectors" of thousands of neurons firing simultaneously, and the pre-existing structures in the nervous system originate from evolution, which is a statistical process.
"Just statistics", as far as I can tell! ;-)