[andreyk]

This (presumably) refers to "Good ol' Fashioned AI" aka Symbolic AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...) . It's a bit of an over-simplification to say it's a bunch of if statements, but it does involve encoding a bunch of rules/symbols by humans (as opposed to learning from data). It's a largely dead paradigm, though aspects of it are still found in various modern approaches (eg task and motion planning, knowledge bases, etc.) often in combination with learning approaches.