Rethinking artificial intelligence (and what's the point of it?)

The Mind Machine Project has been launched at MIT. This project claims to bring together four generations of intelligence research by looking at cognition, memory, thought and other themes. It sound ambitious, but I have some serious doubt about how useful it will prove to be. The advantage of the techniques that are used in computational intelligence is that they are immediately useful to the real world, for modelling and data mining. A true artificial intelligence is very cool, but how useful would it really be?