It's called Moravec's paradox. Basically the AI things that we thought would be easy ("computer vision, pfft, give it a few months") turned out to be really really hard. And the AI/computer things that we thought would be hard were actually not that hard (Some scenes of Star Trek: The Next Generation have data pausing for a moment to return the result of a query. Google has faster response times today)
Maybe the pause is for adding human-like "flavor" and not really necessary?
To take a Steve Jobs'ism, once tech advances sufficiently you have to introduce qualities that may have nothing to do with tech, to make things more pleasing to us humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox