Playing Pong as part of a crowd of hundreds of people — something I had never before experienced — changed my thinking. Before then, I would not have thought that a crowd could collectively become a kind of super-being.
But mathematically it makes sense. The more people there are, the greater is the tendency for the collective response to rapidly converge to the mean, and the smaller will be the statistical effect of outliers.
Our Pong game was doing this within a single dimension, with only hundreds of people. Modern AI does something analogous, but with thousands of dimensions and with input from hundreds of thousands of people.
So in a sense, when you are interacting with a ChatBot, you are playing a kind of high dimensional verbal Pong game, in collaboration with a vast number of other people. It seems like magic not because it is actually magic, but because it is something that we have never before experienced.