I've heard this before, but do we? Which were those this from the past that we "stopped called AI and we just call algorithms"?
I see three categories:
(1) very complex algorithms that we never did call "AI".
(2) stuff we did call AI, and we still do - things like expert systems, or IBM's Watson, or game AI. We knew, and still know, that those weren't AGI.
(3) some stuff promoted as AI (like the "AI assistant" Clippy), but which, marketing materials aside, nobody really considered AI or called them that.
But I don't remember this demoting/relabelling of stuff from AI to "just algorithms". It might have happened with some stuff, but I doubt it was a "classic" development as its portrayed.
People in the field would probably say they fall under the AI umbrella, but it's not the common viewpoint. Either someone can conceptualize how they'd work (expert systems) or they've been watered down and turned commonplace (markov chains in software keyboards, identification in Facebook images), and either way it disassociates the technology with the "intelligence" part of "artificial intelligence", so is no longer thought of as part of it.
Some tool using it marketed as AI, I can believe. But then again, nested IFs have probably also been marketed as AI in some products.
I could see someone making a case for this being that 'middle' group but there's a sour note to this process that I don't know from one week to the next whether I find it sneaky or delightful.
Someone else can make that argument, because I'm so sick of silver bullets and gold rushes that I just. don't. care. Sturgeon's Law applies (90% of everything is crap) and I'll listen just enough to see if anyone is proposing which bits are the 10% to keep a finger on the scale if I think it'll matter. But let everyone else bleed over this, because in another ten years they'll be laughing about how silly they were to think this was going to solve all of our problems or end our profession.
Software is eating most things. If something eats software, your employability will be the least of your existential crises.