I haven't seen anyone claim that explicitly, but I think you are also misunderstanding/misrepresenting how modern AI techniques actually work. The bulk of the information in the resulting program is not "hard coded" by humans in the way that you are implying. Generally there are relatively short typed-in programs which then use millions of examples to automatically learn the actual information in a relatively "organic" way. And even the human brain has a sort of short 'digital' source code in DNA.
Interesing. My professional bias is showing, part of my job is programming, I respect elite programmers who are able to deal with algorithmic complexity, I thought if AI is the hardest programming problem then it is just more of that.
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