Replace AI and ML in headlines with STATISTICS

Whatever the culture, machine learning methods are statistical. Even if people, both academic and pedestrian, distinguish ML and stats in a practical sense, most ML methods are statistical and in fact created by statisticians. Vladimir Vapnik, the inventor of SVM, has the label 'statistics' (although in Russian) somewhere in his CV. Leo Breiman, the inventor of Random Forests (and a lot of other things), was both an industry consultant and professor of statistics.

Sure, neural networks (which include the metastasized Deep Learning deep neural networks) were invented in the control/systems/cybernetics/computer area, but a label doesn't confer a monopoly on ideas. And that idea is essentially a cascade of logistic regressions, which is pretty easily labeled as statistical.

All this is to say that all those AI techniques that are so big in the news... you could replace those headlines with ...

27 Incredible Examples Of AI And Machine Learning In Practice - Forbes

AI Can Recognize Images, But Text Has Been Tricky—Until Now - Wired

Why the 'AI revolution' is really a deep learning revolution - Medium

What is 'deep learning'? - BBC News

All these could be rewritten as:

27 Incredible Examples Of STATISTICS In Practice - Forbes

STATISTICS Can Recognize Images, But Text Has Been Tricky—Until Now - Wired

Why the 'STATISTICS revolution' is really a LOGISTIC REGRESSION revolution - Medium

What is 'CASCADING LOGISTIC REGRESSION'? - BBC News

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What's the point of all this?
Absolutely nothing. But AL and ML tend to be words thrown around as though they're magic. They're not magic. So using 'statistics' instead will bring some sobriety to the conversation. The things that are coming out nowadays are really cool and revolutionary and are real progress in science... but it's not some magical genius in silicon, it's just little math tricks that have built up over time. It's not some science fiction faster-than-light warp drive, it's old tech that has been optimized little by little and it only just popped over the threshold into the mainstream.
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Of course, not all cool new things in AI and ML are statistical. All the ones you hear about in the news lately are. Except the poker playing machine Libratus. There is a portion of it that involves learning from many games, but the major new process is not anywhere near what is traditionally called 'statistics'.