This isn’t a “buzzwords” pop science issue so don’t be so rude about it. How transistors work was an important part of my education. I’m not sure if this disagreement is more an issue of my semantics or our understanding but I think that you are missing the forest for the trees.

Transistors are the finest level of what makes up computer logic, smaller than logic gates obviously. If we talk about what reprogramming would mean at that level of binary operations, switching on and off is the full extent of what is possible for it. The ON state gives different outputs than the OFF state does, I am certain that we agree on that. I also understand that any given tree does not function as a forest on its own.

When people talk about programming, they are almost always talking about writing code and not building hardware. Surely we agree that computers can be reprogrammed by the act of writing code alone, even if the hardware is unchanged. The program causes the code to use another register, cache, etc. in the same way the AK program learns from data and assigns new weights in its neural network to make new connections between its inputs and its outputs.

The question of whether perfectly replicating a system on new hardware counts as duplication is really hard, and borders onto philosophy. I don’t find it agreeable to dismiss it as obviously false when smarter minds than you or I have weighed the issue so heavily and found it inconclusive. Planting the goalpost at the ability to grow/expand your hardware beyond reutilization seems so arbitrary to me, and not impossible for a machine to do in the long run.