If there's any magic being alluded to, it's by the people who say that AIs will never reach or exceed human intellectual capabilities because they're "just machines", with the implication that human brains contain mystical intelligence/creativity/emotion substances.
"AIs will never reach or exceed human intellectual capabilities" is an example of Wittgenstein's point that philosophical debates only sound interesting because they don't define their terms first. If you define AI this is I think either trivially true or trivially false.
In the cases where it's false (you could get an artificial human) it still doesn't obviously lead to bad real life consequences, because that relies on another unfounded leap from superintelligence to "takes over the world" ignoring things like, how does it pay its electricity bills, and how does it solve the economic calculation problem.
It's more like having children. Sure they might become a serial killer, but that's a weird reason not to do it.
