genuine question (asking because i have a biased perspective): why dont you consider advances in ai to be a major shift? in the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in capabilities in computer vision, language understanding, robotics, etc.
It seems like AI has settled into making discriminators. Maybe intelligence really is just pattern matching and grouping? I don't think it is, but I could be wrong.
The question is: will the potential be fullfiled.
Maybe, given the many startups doing real work with machine learning(besides the many that just hype), it's reasonable to guess that that the potential Will be fullfiled.
To your broader point, it's not hard to find some specific domains of machine learning where there have been huge advances. But zoom out and look at the broader picture and the results aren't so impressive.