[harikb]

> When women were mailed material telling them they're pregnant even before they themselves knew but no one batted an eye here

This is example often quoted. This wasn’t AI. I believe it was Target and it was simple correlation with search keywords

Moreover the issue was her parents finding out before she herself told them. The result would have been same if she had setup a baby registry at Target and the company assumed the news wasn’t a secret.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

[kbenson]

As a nitpick, it is AI, it's just bit different than the current crop of what most people think of as AI. Expert systems and evolutionary programming are also in the same spectrum as ML, as steps along the path to what we think true AI will be (even if not necessarily a straight path).

Noticing statistical correlations and acting on them automatically in a recommendation engine is definitely a type of AI.