I think that the mistake is thinking that "smart" is a meaningful word. I'd encourage you to learn about the technology you're critiquing and not listen to memetic bullshit from articles like the one we're discussing. Consider:

• AI/cybernetics/robotics (same field, different perspectives) is always only useful for specific tasks, never for general replacement of humans
• Black-box treatments of machine learning are only done at the most introductory level and there are several ways to examine how e.g. a Transformers-based language model's weights contribute to its outputs
• We have many useful theories about how to learn functions in general, with machine learning as a special case

This has happened before and it will happen again. I'm sure you've seen the phrase "AI winter" floating around.