Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:
"In some ways you could say intelligence is all about prediction," he explained. "What you can identify in intelligence is it can predict what is going to happen in the world with more accuracy and more time horizon than others."
rather than of a world optimizer. This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition. This "AI as intelligence augmentation" view appears to be prevalent among the AI researchers in general.
Of course people say "but this is silly, obviously we need to condition on health status."
The point is: what if we can't? Or what if we there are other causally relevant factors here? In fact, what is "causally relevant" anyways... We need a system! ML people don't think about these questions very hard, generally, because culturally they are more interested in "algorithmic approaches" to prediction problems.
(This is a clarification of gwern's response to the grandparent, not a reply to gwern.)