how refreshing to hear a fact-based, thoroughly accurate technical discussion here. AI is a field that has struggled to little avail, making only incremental progress over the years. Not that people shouldn't keep trying...
I'm all in favor of darpa but the current head (Tony Tether) knows nothing about AI and up til now has been extremely reluctant to fund anything like this whatsoever--good judgement up to this point. Not sure what changed, though there's been all sorts of darpa programs for advanced AI development during his tenure that never even got funded in the last several years. Tether has a cold-war mindset and micromanages darpa; most program managers dislike him for it, but as far as AI goes, he's probably doing taxpayers a favor.
I agree w/Steely Tom: this project will go the way of so many that came before it--utter obscurity. Shame.
For all the points I raised, I still think that truely intelligent machines are possible. I just don't think I'll see them in my lifetime or that the current computer architectures/programming paradigms can support them. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be research. A lot of people in the field focus on hardware and reasoning algorithms--not as many focus on how to represent, organize, and associate information (the CYC program is one notable exception)--which is key. I also think there is much promise in using the WWW as a starting point for AI research.
Developing AI is (perhaps) the hardest research problem ever--by several orders of magnitude. When you think about it, it all about people figuring out how they are wired and how to replicate their own archaic programming.
Because of the above, progress will be very slow and lots of $$ will be wasted on dead ends--but that is the nature of research. Unfortunately, you don't know what will work apriori. Also, unfortunately, the field attract a lot of charatans, probably because no one expects really a lot of success.