Is AI a scam?

I was looking at AIMA the other day. You know, Norvig and that other guy?

Well I was reading the book and skimming through and it just hit me. This is all total bullshit. This shit doesn't work at all.

The books a scam written be charlatans - they include a bunch of well known stuff that you have to. E.g. alpha-beta search (invented by john mccarthy), some prolog, lots of talk about bayes law.

But between all that stuff (which is very basic knowledge) they just have surveys. X tried this in 1992. Y tried this in 1994. That's great but I want to write a program that solves a problem - why are they teaching all these methods that fall flat? Because it's the best we currently know?

Pathetic.

Aren't the Sussman's thoughts on AI very anthropocentric? Humans represent a very small percentage of brained organisms on the planet, and yet they are the only ones that can explain the reasoning behind their behaviors (and only some of the time, at that). Can we not therefore conclude that this property is not strictly necessary for artificially intelligent systems?