I don't know if I agree with this. We're having a revolution in NN-based statistical modeling and machine learning, not AI. And it's not happening because Minsky was holding back the field, it's happening because GPUs improved to the point where these models could work and investing in them made economic sense.

I think you may be kidding (and if so, hats off, because citing Hawkins as a sage, and misspelling his name, is some choice dry humor). But in case you aren't:

The whole "Minsky and Papert killed the perceptron" lesson-in-a-nutshell was a historical anecdote at the time the connectionist resurgence started in the 1980s with backprop. I.e., Minsky was already in the distant past by the 1990s, having no influence on connectionism or the NIPS crowd, from which large-scale machine learning eventually sprung.