Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specialized algorithms and hardcoded chess knowledge. The programs still won't be able to learn in any interesting sense, but with the help of several orders of magnitude of hardware speed, they will be 200 ELO stronger than the best human!"
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eyudkowsky
His research is in making AGI (artificial general intelligence) not go skynet by building in morals. That seems fairly pure to me.
The point is that people who call themselves AI researches, the vast majority of the time are not working on AGI but on weak AI.
Revolutionary or not, I don't think it was trivial to make an autonomous vehicle.
Uhm, Hans Moravec isn't exactly "anyone". :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Edit: To be clear, Moravec shows that you misrepresent the AI field of that time. But sure, he wasn't the mainstream.
Here is what you don't understand: There are very, very, very few people who do research on "AI". People research medical diagnosis, or search, or data mining, or speech recognition, or vision, or chess. If you go to a conference on AI, these are the people you will meet. If you look at who the NSF is funding with their "robust intelligence" area, these are the people you will find. You can only say that "AI research hasn't done much in the last 30 years" if you also say "no one has worked on AI in the last 30 years".
update: if you want to see what people in the mainstream (Kurzweil is not mainstream!) are actually working on, try browsing the IJCAI proceedings:
http://ijcai.org/papers09/contents.php