How far away are we really from artificial intelligence?

By the mid-1950s, the world realized that computers were going to play a major role in future technology. Military, business and educational entities began investing heavily in computers, and rapidly advancing hardware meant that the potential for computing seemed endless. Artificial intelligence, perhaps more than any other aspect of computing, captured the public's imagination, and predictions of a future ruled by computation and robots were common in news stories and throughout science fiction literature and cinema. To understand why early experts were so optimistic about artificial intelligence, it's important to understand Moore's Law. Computers developed rapidly through the 1950s and early 1960s, and Gordon Moore, a co-founder of computing giants Fairfield Semiconductor and Intel, predicted that the number of transistors in a given area on a circuit board would double every year, leading to exponential growth in processing power.