I completely agree. Having worked with some AI systems in the past (mostly ANNs although I'd love to even begin to understand SVMs), I think that there's more "practicality" in just building robots/software that (based on various pattern analyses/etc/etc) figures out where a malignant tumor is, for example, rather than a robot that can understand coherence relations or what-have-you.

So I don't fault the CS community from stepping away from linguistic puzzles and getting on with more useful stuff. After all, that's what engineering is. It looks like Levesque disagrees, but I'm not sure he's right.