To go yet another rung deeper, I'll revive an argument I've made previously, which is that it turns into an economic problem. The easiest entry point for understanding the link between the religious way of confusing AI with an economic problem is through automatic language translation. If somebody has heard me talk about that before, my apologies for repeating myself, but it has been the most readily clear example.
For three decades, the AI world was trying to create an ideal, little, crystalline algorithm that could take two dictionaries for two languages and turn out translations between them. Intellectually, this had its origins particularly around MIT and Stanford. Back in the 50s, because of Chomsky's work, there had been a notion of a very compact and elegant core to language. It wasn't a bad hypothesis, it was a legitimate, perfectly reasonable hypothesis to test. But over time, the hypothesis failed because nobody could do it.