The origin of intelligent behavior

When I hear news about "AI" these days, what is often meant are methods for pattern recognition and approximations of complex functions, most importantly in the form of Machine Learning. It is true that we have seen impressive applications of Machine Learning systems in a number of different industries such as product personalization, fraud detection, credit risk modeling, insurance pricing, medical image analysis, or self-driving cars. What is the origin of intelligent behavior? Intelligent behavior is the capability of using one's knowledge about the world to make decisions in novel situations: people act intelligently if the use what they know to get what they want. The premise of AI research is that this type of intelligence is fundamentally computational in nature, and that we can therefore find ways to replicate it in machines.