The problem is communication, understanding each other and trust. Do this exercise: from those 7 billions discard the people who speak a language you don't understand, then discard the people who don't care about you, then discard the people who you don't care about, discard the people that interact daily with you but you don't trust, keep discarding until you are left with a list of people you will share all your secrets with. How long is that list? I will be surprised if it consists of more than 2 people, for most of us it is 0, we are not alone but we feel lonely. A machine will never betray us, it may fail and we can fix it but it doesn't have bad intentions like people do, we feel safer writing our feelings in a text file or in a notepad than telling about them to other people. And what if that text file or notepad could reply to us? A cold, non human reply that helps us feel less lonely sounds promising.
I dunno. That strikes me a bit on par with talking to your dog after a hard day of living. I know that companionship is not actually the end goal of AI or Robotics, but if it was, I think we'd be better off fighting the source of our problems than using technology as a band aid.
Some things are easier said than done, fighting the source of our problems is one of them (at least for me, shyness is a curse), band aid solutions can make us temporary feel better. Edit: I forgot to say I agree with you, it is not the end goal of AI. I just wanted to share my personal reasons for trying to have more accurate AI.
From what I have seen I still couldn't find anything that can be called "Artificial Intelligence", it feels like we are still in a very rough draft version of what we can call artificial intelligence. I haven't seen much progress in AI in the latest years, algorithms seem to be the same (or variations of them), the difference is that computers got faster and have more memory, this allowed impressive things such as brute forcing chess moves to beat the best player but I wouldn't call it "intelligent". Edit: a disclaimer, I haven't read very much about the machine that plays Go, as far as I know it can't use brute force to play the game but I don't know which algorithm it uses.