ya I think i know what you're talking about.
"asking if a machine can think is like asking if a submarine can swim"
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD936.html AI is problem specific. that means you must customize the AI software to some degree to the situation at hand.
think of all the life experiences you've racked up over they years. you have been learning new methods to find solutions all your life. these methods come second nature to you once you've learned them. but at first they may seem daunting.
each method you've learned is like an AI engineered to the problem at hand.
now, I'm no philosopher so I don't really pine over the question of sentience.
but from an engineering standpoint
I totally think it's possible to train a general purpose robot to help around the house etc... but it would take 20 years to train the first one, just like a person.
we can use things like evolutionary programming to write programs for us. but again they are problem specific.
as far as creating a robot that can solve problems for which it has not been trained is a difficult problem indeed. the vast majority of people are unable to do so.
we use evolutionary programming to write programs for wierd problems we don't know how to go about solving. and evolutionary programming for tough problems takes supercomputers. I would imagine we would need another 10 years of moore's law before a robot will be able to use a genetic algorithm to evolve candidate evolutionary programs for arbitrary problems.
