Saying that nothing has happened in AI since seems a bit...exaggerated. But I don't know much of anything about the field - anyone else care to comment?
I'd say that the algorithms are key in AI, not necessarily the language. You can program neural networks, genetic algorithms, search in Blub.
The early AI programs tended to solve toy problems. No one had thought much then about the implications of the curse of dimensionality: that each entity you add to the problem (say, throw another object into your object-manipulating robot's environment) increases the problem space exponentially (or even factorially).
But you're right, there has been a ton of progress in AI. The initial bias toward ontologies, expert systems, and top-down algorithms has given way to bottom-up systems that are data-driven rather than abstraction-driven.
One major example is using neural networks, SVMs, RBFs to discover implicit features in a data set rather than depending on an expert to code up those features explicitly. Experts don't scale, but data will always be with us. Thus we've seen increasing interest in information retrieval as opposed to ontological knowledge engineering.
But a lot is going on in the field even today. I found this talk very interesting:
Well, we have vehicles that drive themselves across deserts, but not machines that will argue with you over whether or not Will Ferrel is the greatest comedian ever. I say that we are making progress, though not as much as some had hoped.
My view may sound rather radical, but I think not everything that's called "A.I." has to do with intelligence. In other words, if a progress is reported by an AI researcher, it doesn't mean anything.
There are many forms of intelligence and for example Turing machines are just one, probably. If we are talking, however, about intelligent survival machines like ourselves, then we are not even close to understanding how it works.
as we all know, no progress has been made in [AI research] since Lisp came out
You may have some unorthodox views on what "AI research" constitutes or how much progress had been made, but prefixing your comment with "as we all know..." is obnoxious. The consensus view is certainly not that no progress at all in AI has been made since 1958.
Care to show anything that we use in everyday life and that evolved from the AI science as a result of its 50-year existence? Ok, except CAPTCHA maybe (just kidding).
honestly, i think hard AI (as propounded in various SF genres) will always be next 20 years away. a borg like future with man-machine symbiosis seems more likely i.e use machine to _augument_ human capacities, rather than supplant them.
Lisp came out in 1958, according to the wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29
Saying that nothing has happened in AI since seems a bit...exaggerated. But I don't know much of anything about the field - anyone else care to comment?