One of the aphorisms you'll hear a lot of if you look into machine learning beyond what the futurologists bleet is "learning requires bias." What it's saying is that you need to build an assumption about the type of function being learned and what constitutes having learned it into a learning algorithm; you can't just say "learn to recognize faces from this set of examples", you have to say "learn to recognize faces by finding a hyperplane that divides the space of n-dimensional vectors into images of faces and non-images-of-faces by maximizing the distance between the set of faces and non-faces in this set of examples." There is a reason for that, and it applies to all optimization problems. We cannot now, nor will we ever, be able to write programs that can write any sort of program without them really being (possibly very clever) compilers or interpreters. You can find a lot of old papers talking about "automatic programming," but what they're really talking about is compilers; to people used to all programming being done in machine language, a compiler looked like giving it was getting a specification and writing a program in much the same was as programmers get specifications and write programs.

That is not to say that we can't use AI in programming language implementations. For example, Postgresql's query planner uses a genetic algorithm, essentially using AI to write an efficient program to satisfy a query. Code generators in compilers often use techniques from AI as well.

P.P.S. is it paranoia (besides being obviously futile) to require by law that all AI developments are conducted on networks entirely isolated from the internet?

AI, or algorithms that started out in AI, are everywhere. Your search results, recommendations from Amazon and Youtube, the spam filters that keep you inbox from filling up with penis enlargement pumps and horny teenagers... You interact with AI all the time, you just don't notice because AI the actually existing set of technologies is much more mundane than AI the science fiction futurologists like to breathlessly write about being just around the corner. Yes, requiring AI be isolated from the Internet would be overly paranoid, and you would loose a lot of features of the sites you use regularly.