ML is more like alchemy, I'd say: mixing components using intuition and experience, but without understanding what these components really are and why they work. In this analogy, AI is the recipe to make gold and the ML alchemists haven't invented nuclear physics yet.
But now we know there was physics at the bottom of alchemy. Whereas demonology at best leads you to psychiatry, and we still don't have simple models of what works there. Nor much hope of finding them. Thinking is a messy business.
