Yeah, a high-profile AI teacher (Peter Norvig) offered these quotes to illustrate the history AI's hype:
"It is not my aim to surprise or shock you -- but the simplest way
I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines
that think."
-- Herbert Simon, 1957
"Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work
that a man can do."
-- Herbert Simon, 1965
"Within a generation the problem of creating 'artificial
intelligence' will be substantially solved."
-- Marvin Minsky, 1967
Not to say AI's a failure -- merely its hype usually is. AI's much like philosophy in this way. Bertrand Russell mentioned something I've heard floating around the AI world too:
"If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any
other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been
ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you
are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a
philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his
study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved
by other sciences. It is true that this is partly accounted for by
the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any
subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called
philosophy, and becomes a separate science. [...]
"This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the
uncertainty of philosophy. There are many questions -- and among
them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual
life -- which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the
human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different
order from what they are now. [...] Yet, however slight may be the
hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of
philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to
make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches
to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the
universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to
definitely ascertainable knowledge."
So we don't yet have the Frankenstein monsters with Oedipal complexes, but we did get a lot of useful techniques and tools. For instance, classic AI found nice results in search, pattern recognition, language parsing, etc. And tools like the Lisp tradition of programming languages are extremely powerful and influential; I use Common Lisp almost every day for hours -- for "just" a webapp -- because I simply don't think there's a better language in some overall sense. It's very general and customizable.
Tayssir