I was in a group that did some research in AI, worked with several famous companies, met lots of smart people, wrote and shipped some software, published a lot

I was in a group that did some research in AI, worked with several famous companies, met lots of smart people, wrote and shipped some software, published a lot of papers, gave a paper at an AAAI IAAI conference at Stanford. Summary: The good papers at the Stanford conference were really just good cases of traditional engineering, statistics, etc. Anything like artificial intelligence (AI) beyond just such traditional approaches had next to no significant role. By then, AI just looked like a new label for old bottles of wine, some good, some bad. The "Open Letter" and the paper it links to look like more of the same: The solid, promising work is traditional approaches in good engineering, statistics, optimization, etc. The rest presents severe problems in specification, testing, verification, even security. Maybe the best thing to do with AI that is not just good engineering, etc., that is, software and systems that are built but not really designed or well tested, is at least to be careful about security and keep the thing locked up in a strong padded cell and, especially where any harm could be done, take any of its output with many grains of salt and as just a suggestion. It appears that, bluntly, we just do not have even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about how intelligence works, not even for a kitty cat. When I was in the field, an excuse was that artificial intelligence was not really our work or our accomplishment but only our long-term goal. Hmm ....