"statistical modelling:" <- 1 discipline "Two cultures" Maybe re-read it? Or read Geoff Hinton, or Wasserman, or Judea Pearl or Hastie & Tibrishani or Murphy on the subject..?
AI in a pitch is exactly as much BS as interstellar travel. Definitely go ahead and study all the failed attempts. Norvig wrote the most popular text nearly a quarter of a century ago. It didn't exist then either. There is no going to alpha centuri there is no Hal9000. There is no intelligence that is artificial.
Machine Learning exists and is real and is statistical inference done by computer. There is no point where you can look at it and say "Here is the boundary between statistics and ML." Try it. Glorified curve fitting has some fantastic applications and killer demos. Along comes the hype train exactly as you'd expect. Put it on the blockchain or has the hype for that died now?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612437/what-is-machine-le...
Shallow BS detection, worth doing if only for one's own sanity.