Not sure if I agree with this. My computer can't do a lot of things and only a small set of that would really be considered AI.
The chess example isn't great. We have known chess is a deterministic game and a good enough algorithm on powerful enough hardware should beat or stalemate a grandmaster. The state space is big but finite. Its just a more complex form of checkers. This seemed to be more of a research issue of a known solvable problem that needs its state space shrunk to something we can calculate than a true AI breakthrough.
I think AI like described in this article is a functioning, self-determined, self-learning, HAL-like system. This doesn't exist. It probably can with the right research and funding. Its not a problem of perception or arguing about what may or may not be AI. Although the AI-effect can be annoying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
I don't see the AI effect explaining why AI hasn't gotten farther. I think not understanding consciousness or the brain on a certain level is probably our biggest hurdle. Unlike chess, we don't know what we're trying to solve exactly.
It's not surprising consciousness research is such a mess - it is a topic that is too close to how people define themselves. If somebody had a nice, simple, practical, hypothesis it would probably be attacked and buried. Civilization had a hard time adjusting to the sun being the center of the solar system, and many still haven't come to terms with the fact that we evolved from common ancestors of other living things. I doubt many people want to hear that our thoughts, our feelings and experiences can be simply modeled on a computer. Or worse, that filthy animals are conscious too.
The reason the problem is "hard" is not scientific, it is emotional.
The problem is that consciousness is a metaphysical concept, you can't scrutinize it with the scientific method, it requires a complete change of perspective to understand consciousness.
AI is whatever hasn't been done yet. - Douglas Hofstadter (1980)
... taken from my fortune clone @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
The general the goal of AI is to do things only Humans can do (in the past this included chess or holding a semi-coherent conversation). Now its more focused on human consciousness like Data from Star Trek so their statement is fair enough.
Also I'd bet the body helps - if you had a 'cloud' (not android) version of Data, people would be even harder to convince.
The entertainment industry has set a pretty strange standard for A.I. with the general public. What A.I. will eventually become will probably be wildly different than a limited personification like Data in Star Trek.
The first automobiles looked like horse-drawn carriages, so maybe it's not right to fault people for expecting A.I. to look like humans.
The big practical problem in AI is not "consciousness", but "common sense", the ability to predict what's probably going to happen from an act and deciding whether or not to do it. After we solve that problem and are able to build robots that can get through a day of diverse tasks without help, we can look at consciousness again. As a practical matter, it's useful to view "consciousness" as a background task with the job of adjusting the parameters used to formulate sequences of actions.
Humans can't figure out how consciousness works by introspection because brains don't have enough internal access to their own processing. Other methods will be necessary, and we don't have the analysis tools yet.
[Citation needed]
It's the same problem that AI has. AI is whatever a computer can't do.
A few decades ago the computer couldn't play chess, so chess was a good example of AI. Once the computers could play chess and easily wind a match against a grand master, the we can see behind the curtain and understand the tricks, and now chess is only a circus trick and no real AI.
For now, computers can't simulate consciousness, so it's a mystery and a good AI research topic.