The field is most certainly not dead. Mass media (movies, books, etc) over the last 60 years or so has presented a vary narrow vision of "A.I"; a vision of what

The field is most certainly not dead. Mass media (movies, books, etc) over the last 60 years or so has presented a vary narrow vision of "A.I"; a vision of what are more or less people that happen to be in synthetic versions of the old flesh and bone varieties, that are normally repressed and enslaved or trying to kill the carbon-bags for some faulty reason or another. That vision has basically made the term Artificial Intelligence become yet another meaningless marketing term. The concept of A.I. is like the concept of organic chemistry. There are vast sub-disciplines that are loosely collected under the term "organic chemistry" because they more or less all involve carbon atoms at some point. A.I is like this as well, because there are many, many sub-disciplines and they all involve the concept of systems that are capable of "learning". So, my first recommendation is to just forget any preconceptions of "Artificial Intelligence" because its not something that really exists, just like Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator does not have what cows crave. What does exist is this vast field of scientific, practical, and commercial activity involving learning systems. These systems are typically closely tied to computation, aka hardware or software, but not all. Some work is done in biology and some in organic chemistry (interesting cross connection there). Another preconception to forget is that "A.I" died in the 80's and is irrelevant today. What nearly all people who are even loosely familiar with the term, beyond killer robots from the Future or lonely little robot boys with mommy issues, is that A.I. has no part in their lives. The truth is that it has been all around us for many years. The timely delivery of your new shoes from Zappos or buying oranges in the winter: shipping. Tens of thousands of planes in the air at any moment: transportation. The computer chips that are in your computer or handheld that you are reading this on: computing (simulated annealing, fascinating!). Millisecond stock trades: the economy. Automated stellar classification: astronomy. The list goes on. So once you put aside your preconceptions for a bit, start asking what kinds of fields you're really interested and then looking at how learning systems are influencing them. Sometimes you will be surprised to learn that what might be classically called "A.I" has utterly invaded your favorite field and that the people who work in it are entirely unaware that the learning systems they're using might even be considered "A.I".