"But the "fruit fly" goal posts cited by Mead & I have been 'day one goalposts' from both proponents and skeptics. "

At this point, I call bullshit outright, and respectfully request that you provide a source by one of the 'founding fathers' of AI. Indeed, many of the original thinkers in AI were solely engaged in the production of 'brain-in-a-box' type scenarios. Many of Turings original formulation of the Turing Test in fact control for the assumption that the AI in question has no real command of or navigation in 'the world'. Perhaps Minsky may have said something somewhere, but Minsky is pretty well known for being wrong (and indeed, probably set the field of Neural Networks back 10-20 years!). I would be careful about how core you see Minsky as in AI.

I don't know why you look at the 70s as being so important to AI. I would say the 60s were much more important. I don't know where you get off saying that AI has not fulfilled many of the original objectives of what we thought an intelligent system could do: Playing Chess, Proving Theorems, passing Turing type Tests, etc.

Also, you are simply wrong about Meads critique, and Mead is wrong as well. We have perfectly good artificial Insects that can react to threats, and even 'learn' how to copw with bodily damage. The DARPA 'urban challenge' competitors exhibit many if not all the things Mead is looking for in his fruit-fly: Recognition of threat from visual processing, evasion, navigating a complex and dynamic real world environment... Etc.

but hard AI as touted by the True Believers is a different animal

'Hard AI' Means something very specific, and thus I can't even make sense out of this sentence.

Yeti