Without meaning to sound patronising, I believe I understand your confusion. Allow me to explain.
My comment is making an entirely uncontroversial statement: that "backpropagation is an AI algorithm". Not that "backpropagation is AI". The latter could be taken to mean that backpropagation is itself artificially intelligent, that it exhibits some kind of intelligence (leaving aside for the moment the fact that we have no agreed upon definition of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise). If I understand your comment correctly, this is the interpretation you make of my comment.
However, what my comment says, and this should be clear from the context ("most researchers will agree"), is that backpropagation is an algorithm from the field of research that is known as AI.
In that context, "AI", "Artificial Intelligence", is the field of research that investigates methods to construct "AI", "Artificial Intelligence(s)". Backpropagation is a component of one such method, neural networks.
I think then that the confusion, which is also discussed, and exhibited, in the article, stems from the fact that the same word is used to describe both "artificial intelligence" and the field that researches artificial intelligence.
This is not serious : back-propogation is the origin point of modern AI. This is the algorithm that powers the deep network revoultion. It's not the end point, it's not a magic box, but it is fundamentally an AI algorithm.
Just saying "no it isn't" is just not helpful or useful.
You are missing the entire point of the article if you continue to call these algorithms "AI". Inflating simple things like this to mean "AI" has led to the term being meaningless.
I thought one of the key principles in this discussion is that the goalposts keep moving: before it's a solved problem, it requires Artificial Intelligence; once solved, it's just basic algorithms. The bar for what constitutes 'AI' keeps getting raised.
People have often believed some narrow tasks require general AI (AGI), however it turns out that almost any specific task can be solved without building an AGI first. This does not change the meaning of "AGI" - a system that is able to perform any mental task as well as an average human.
There are no accepted definitions of these terms. Are they meaningless?
AI that does not include backpropagation or logical deduction or GA's or optimisation is... is... magical thinking. AI without the nuts and bolts from the last 50 years of work is meaningless. The article is heartfelt, and we all agree with the tenant that people pretending that they are using AI when they are really using a database isn't a good thing, but if you take any current system look right down inside it all you will find is a Shannon type implementation of church-turing.
There are tonnes of other approaches to machine learning that don't involve backprop! There are also other approaches to neural netwroks that don't use backprop (have a look at Numenta's stuff for example). I suggest you watch Pat Winston's brilliant MIT AI lectures to see how huge the range of techniques is.
My comment is making an entirely uncontroversial statement: that "backpropagation is an AI algorithm". Not that "backpropagation is AI". The latter could be taken to mean that backpropagation is itself artificially intelligent, that it exhibits some kind of intelligence (leaving aside for the moment the fact that we have no agreed upon definition of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise). If I understand your comment correctly, this is the interpretation you make of my comment.
However, what my comment says, and this should be clear from the context ("most researchers will agree"), is that backpropagation is an algorithm from the field of research that is known as AI.
In that context, "AI", "Artificial Intelligence", is the field of research that investigates methods to construct "AI", "Artificial Intelligence(s)". Backpropagation is a component of one such method, neural networks.
I think then that the confusion, which is also discussed, and exhibited, in the article, stems from the fact that the same word is used to describe both "artificial intelligence" and the field that researches artificial intelligence.
And I hope this clarifies the confusion.