However it can be said that many "autonomous cars" on the road today do not fall under the definition of AI you posted from quora. They do not contain deep learning, neural nets or any of those fundamental AI design principles. Yet the media often labels them "artificial intelligence".
It depends on what we call "autonomous cars". An old Mercedes S-Class which can stay autonomously within the lines on a highway doesn't need machine learning. But more advanced systems such as the one tested by Uber use machine learning as it would be impossible to hard code every situation.
Anyways the sad truth here may be the media inaccurately labels many things "artificial intelligence" which are not. When the media does this, it could open the door to bitcoin's supply algorithm being labeled artificial intelligence. Due to diminishing of standards.
Exactly. Words are often used mistakenly and interchangeably when they become buzzwords. I'd say the criteria to define true AI is if the model gets refined with experience, which is not the case of the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment algorithm (it just follows a set of hard coded rules).
Considering brute force as a form of AI would be like considering a Casio calculator as AI as it manages to calculate 4+3=7...