What has become of Artificial Intelligence (AI) lately?

I remember back in the 1980s when I was growing up holding onto this vision that by the 21st century artifical intelligence and robotics would be as common as jets flying around the world. Well in 2005, that apparently never occurred. I remember that Japan's MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) had a national initiative and 10-year plan started in 1985 for making artificial intelligence and knowledge processing the foundation of its 21st century technology initiative. I read a book about this (can't remmber the title right now so will update this posting later, something like "Fifth Generation"). It's 2005, what happened?

Maybe all the Japanese robots we see from Honda, Toyota, Sony, NEC are the results of the MITI initiative. What got me thinking about AI recently is an article I read in Application Development Trends "I, Smartapp", about applying AI techniques to future development tools and adapative applications.

In the article was a side note about "The Singularity". "The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed from the astrophysics of black holes. The phrase has varied meanings; as used by Vernor Vinge and Raymond Kurzweil, it refers to the idea that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030. Then what?

Well, Ray recently published his book, "The Singularity Is Near". I haven't read it yet however, it looks interesting enough to get and read in 2006. It is a science book about AI and the technological singularity so is definitely worth an inspection. There's even a website http://www.singularity.com that is a good resource for AI from Kurzweil's perspective. For additional info see this link.

Is this just more visionary double-speak? Ray Kurzwel is a very intelligent and impressive man. I am pretty much an optimist when it comes to these types of things so I think around the 2030s or 2040s "The Singularity" will occur. I am not sure what will become of our world as we know it when the machines are significantly smarter than us. Hopefully, we will have designed, programmed and raised them (the machines) well to be good, honest, benevolent beings.