The proposition of artificial intelligence, whether at human-level or not, is that a suitably-programmed computing device (as opposed to an immaterial algorithm

The proposition of artificial intelligence, whether at human-level or not, is that a suitably-programmed computing device (as opposed to an immaterial algorithm) could manifest the properties which we have chosen to call "intelligence" when we observe them in biological agents, and similarly for consciousness. Particularly with your comment "no graph traversal algorithm cares, nor will ever", you appear to be trying to impute that the concept of artificial intelligence is predicated on a category error. If so, then this is a fairly common argument, but is itself predicated on a category error.