I remember that. Late '80's, right. That and their robot that could paint pictures from video images of live subjects.
All bogus. AI has been living on its promises for nearly 40 years.
(steely)
AI has some fundamental problems including:
-- In order to understand a little about something, you have to know a lot about everything
-- Computers have no good mechanism to integrate new information in its proper context the first time
-- Computers might be able to eventually recognize context, but it would involve a lot of failure (which people tend to put up with from other people, but not from computers)
-- And (last but not least), no one really understands how the human brain represents, stores, and retrieves information and creates usable knowlege.
Until you solve the above problems, AI will go nowhere fast. I always get a chuckle when so called "scholars" say that AI is just a matter of adding processing power. Its all about information organization and management.
"All bogus. AI has been living on its promises for nearly 40 years."
Not entirely. They figured out how to play chess.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. AI is, certainly, the most over-hyped area in Computer Science. I daresay that most of those in the field make one false assumption: that human intelligence can be recreated in silicon. I firmly believe this to be impossible, that a computer is the sum of its parts, but the human mind is much more than the sum of its parts.
That said, AI has been a fruitful field. Have you ever used/seen a handheld that converted the "handwriting" into characters on screen? Those are usually done with artificial neural nets, a methodology invented within the last forty years.