Neural Nets vs Well defined lists

I had a thought cross my mind today.  It would be nigh impossible to tell the difference from a highly advanced artificially intelligent being, than from an equally advanced well thought out preprogrammed list of responses.  While the computing power necessary for human scale intelligent behavior is staggering, the computing power to follow a list of instructions that mimic that behavior, has been around for a decade or more.  What this means basically, it that logically we should be able to source a large amount of processing power once to create a "list"of many many possible responses that an android brain may need, e.g. walking/jumping, and of course talking/listening responses.  Then the "list" would be copied to awaiting robot bodies built with the minimal processing power needed to perform from the list. Even though the work and research to bring something like this about is incredible, it none the less has a definite high possibility of probability in my book.

Now where am I gonna find a semi trailer full of FPGAs, and where am I gonna hide it from my wife?