No, ML is basically stats when you have lots of computing power. Classical AI tackled very different kinds of problems. There used to be a "war" of ideas between connectionists (which kind of turned into ML when neural networks no longer tried to be remotely biological) and computationalists, which is where Minsky would probably be closer to. He wants us to understand how minds work in order to model them better.

With ML you don't really try to understand. You throw a dumb and simple-minded algorithm at lots of data and get back good results. You don't try to model all of the complexities of an intelligent problem.

So, no, I would not say ML is a kind of AI.