What counts as a causal problem?

A sufficiently good predictor might be able to answer questions of the form "if I do X, what will happen thereafter?" and "if I do Y, what will happen thereafter?" even though what-will-happen-thereafter may be partly caused by doing X or Y.

Is your point that (to take a famous example with which I'm sure you're already very familiar) in a world where the correlation between smoking and lung cancer goes via a genetic feature that makes both happen, if you ask the machine that question it may in effect say "he chose to smoke, therefore he has that genetic quirk, therefore he will get lung cancer"? Surely any prediction device that would be called "intelligent" by anyone less gung-ho than, say, Ray Kurzweil would enable you to ask it questions like "suppose I -- with my current genome -- chose to smoke; then what?" and "suppose I -- with my current genome -- chose not to smoke; then what?".

I do agree that there are important questions a pure predictor can't help much with. For instance, the machine may be as good as you please at predicting the outcome of particle physics experiments, but it may not have (or we may not be able to extract from it in comprehensible form) any theory of what's going on to produce those outcomes.