Very nice and smooth introduction :)
One thing that I would like to point out is the strong connection machine learning has to statistics. In the early days of AI (often referred as "good old-fashioned artificial intelligence" - GOFAI), the brain was seen as a symbol processor, so that's also what the AI researchers were trying to do. But it turned out, that symbol processing approaches have difficulties dealing with complex settings (such as the "real world"), while statistical approaches are doing much better there.
Thanks, will definitely explore and read more about GOFAI :)