I am, yes, anti-wonder; I do think people get hopped-up on wonder and that lowers their threshold for reasonable belief and they end up in (religious) absurdities.
My issue here, in these terms, is that the "wonder" associated with the magic trick of modern ML is preducing a gross cognitive bias in which people believe this is an example of intelligence; or otherwise, an example like us in some significant sense. This leads to pseudoscience, charlatanism and a religious techno-utopian faith.
At the heart of it is a wonder-scam in the vein of all miracle-based shysterism. The fool looks at the miracle, is impressed out of all reason, and concludes miracles exist.
For sure, I dont really trade in wonder and I have never found it to do anything other than profoundly distort people's beliefs.
It's like someone in crypto talking about a future crypto-based financial system whilst at the same time being unable to processes basically any transactions, stabalise any currency, ensure any regulation, deal with any fraud, etc.
Or likewise, an MLM health company talking about cures for cancer all the while hocking vitamin supplements.
The question of what properties animals have which enable them to implement intelligence isn't relevant to whether correlative statistical techniques which capture word frequencies are "intelligence" -- inasmuch as vitamin 'science' isnt relevant to curing cancer.
This gross level of chalatanism, wishful-thinking, scamming, delusion and out-right fraud is overwhelming.
Try telling that to Sutskever or Karpathy (or indeed a bunch of "rationalists" on twitter, at least a subset of which works in AI) because both of them have made the claim you assert you haven't seen.
Back to my point, your bar is pretty high. Artificial intelligence to the level you describe will basically be a "world as you know it is now obsolete" type discovery. It will likely go down as the most impactful discovery of all time. Most of us have a lower bar for what counts as impressive.