I've been actively researching in this field for close to a decade now, so let me tell you: Today is nothing like when I started. Back then everyone rightly assumed this kind of AI was decades if not centuries away. Nowadays there are still some open questions regarding the path to general intelligence, but even they are more akin to technicalities that will probably be solved on a time frame of years or perhaps even months. And expert systems are basically at the point where they can start taking over.