I might say though, that 30 to 40 years ago, when the field was really young, artificial intelligence wasn't about making money, and the people in the field wer

I might say though, that 30 to 40 years ago, when the field was really young, artificial intelligence wasn't about making money, and the people in the field weren't driven by developing products. It was about understanding how the mind works and trying to get computers to do things that the mind can do. The mind is very fluid and flexible, so how do you get a rigid machine to do very fluid things? That's a beautiful paradox and very exciting, philosophically. Unfortunately all these well intentioned AI professors built nothing and the field devolved into LISP hacking. Now our choice is "accurate model" or "useful expert system". At the time it bothered me that we couldn't do both. Now I realize that it's ok for the model to be imperfect if the results are useful. The general thread also convinces me that Skynet type AI is still far off.