I wonder if it is the same thing that stalled AI research for decades? After the initial burst of hacks that seemed really impressive (ELIZA for example), the field focused on finding formal mathematical solutions to the problems and effectively stalled for 30+ years. It's only in the past few years with a shift to doing statistical things on large sets of data--something that feels a lot more like the hacky original efforts--that it feels like we're making any progress again.

This is from a outsider's point of view so it may be completely wrong. But I did try to take an AI course in the late 90s and it was so far divorced from computer hardware that I joked it should have been in the math department.