I was asked a few weeks ago about why Artificial Intelligence over the past few decades has been such a “failure”, meaning mostly that it isn’t seen to be living up to its great expectations.

James Gaskin at NetworkWorld gives a well-referenced response very similar to the one I gave back then, which went like this:

Essentially, whenever some field of AI achieves a result, the successful work is given a name (intelligent search, [something] recognition, adaptive [something], smart [something], etc.), it leaves the lab, has an impact on industry / research / our lives, and “Artificial Intelligence” remains loosely defined as “the tough cognition problems we haven’t solved yet.”

Mind you, even defined in that way, Marvin Minsky would probably still agree that the creators of AI really need to get a hustle on.