> 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. But why that? There isn't a pri

> 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. But why that? There isn't a principled reason for singling those out. It's just a matter of convention that we call those AI. Pretend you never heard of AI before and you came across these algorithms. No amount of analysis or poking around would lead you to think "oh, man, this is artificial intelligence!". No, you'd see a bunch of statistical techniques that do X, Y, and Z, none of which would jump out at you as "wow, this is AI". All that computers give us is the ability to run tedious computations over larger data sets that would be impractical for human beings to perform. "AI" is what we read into these things. There really is no such thing as such.