When you see politicians say things like this, please keep in mind that most politicians are fairly dim. If you don't believe me, ask one how email works, or what the difference between a website and an ISP is.
In any case, the Senator is proving my point, and no, nothing remotely like the situation that Senator Murphy describes happened.
Everything is magic until you know how the sausage is made.
When I was first in engineering school, less than a decade after single-chip micros became available, we were assigned to build an ALU out of discrete logic… ands, nands, clocks, shift registers, counters…
Because once you built an ALU from logic, and made a new opcode, and programmed the thing with switches… THEN computers could never be magic.
They could be fast, they could accomplish amazing things, but they could never be magic, nor could they ever approach sentience.
Never confuse speed and access to data with sentience.