[z3phyr]

All AI waves have been very productive. The last ones gave us huge advancements in programming language design, operating systems, networking, hci, spawned a few programming paradigms. ..

It does not really translate to the final objective though.

[selestify]

What is it that AI has done for all those fields that you mentioned?

[z3phyr]

The research in AI directly coincided with the development of early computer systems. Lisp and friends (and small but important ideas that come with it ranging from string interning to garbage collection to the macro system to the fundamental idea of compilers and interpreters etc) was contributed to by people mostly involved with Symbolic AI research.

The early programming language parsing research is the direct product of researchers working on natural language processing, and in fact the BNF form was developed for natural languages but later adapted and improved for programming languages.

The idea of Logic programming with prolog and friends comes directly from AI research.

Most of the search algorithms we use unknowingly in various machines have origins in the first AI wave.

The human computer interaction research directly dealt with development of fundamental ideas on speech synthesis, graphical user interfaces and computer graphics.

All in all, The field of applied AI and Computers developed together and a lot of early ideas spearheaded by AI transferred into fundamental general computing, ideas so trivial we do not even think about them now. But they were not so trivial when they were developed, specifically for AI