Artificial AI is like off off-road bicycling

The May 2006 issue of ACM Queue has some fun with the idea of artificial Artificial Intelligence, AI Gets a Brain - Will artificial AI create a new class of intelligent applications?:

In the 50 years since John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence, much progress has been made toward identifying, understanding, and automating many classes of symbolic and computational problems that were once the exclusive domain of human intelligence. Much work remains in the field because humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

The article focuses on the design thinking behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which got a lot of play when it first came out.  It's a service that allows humans to do tasks that have been difficult or too expensive to automate: image selection, data improvement and Japanese text orientation.