Thinking about a Career in AI?

A few years ago, hardly anyone in the computer science profession would admit to working on "artificial intelligence". Not unless they had tenure. Sure, people would say they worked on robotics, natural language processing, voice recognition, or other respectable application areas. But saying you worked on AI was like saying you were a composer: it implied that you were crazy, pretentious, or both. So it's funny to live in an era where AI is cool again, and only us old-timers remember the carnage of AI winters.