Re: To be honest...
in what I've read of it all, it is neither AI or even ML; but predictive analytics based on hand crafted and hand fed data sets.
You haven't read enough. Supervised learning is only one quite small subset of ML. And it is, in fact, machine learning, for some quite rigorous definitions of "learning".
AI is a completely different beast
Care to support that?
It's easy, and vapid, to declare that there's some qualitative difference between ML and "intelligence". Far fewer people are willing to actually try to advance an argument.
John Searle famously argued that approaches based on what he referred to as "symbolic manipulation" were qualitatively different from, and formally less powerful than, intelligence (based on what was in effect a phenomenological argument); but he also stated that he believed human intelligence was a mechanical phenomenon, and thus could in theory be, and he expected would eventually in practice be, duplicated by a human-built machine. That is an argument about the difference between an AI approach and intelligence.
Roger Penrose famously argued that deterministic computers, or any mechanism not formally more powerful than a type-G logical system, is formally less powerful than human intelligence. I don't find his argument persuasive, but it's a fairly well-developed one. It's not just "doh, intelligence is something other than that thing which I think AI is".
The Reg Commentariat are flush with pride in their ability to dismiss AI and ML with a variety of hackneyed, tired, inaccurate characterizations and unsupported generalizations. Sorry, kids, but you get no points for that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
