Your question is a little amorphous, so we need to distill it. Let's forget for a moment about your skillset. What industry would you like to be in? Do you want to apply AI to consumer products? Small business products? Huge enterprise products? How do you feel about a job at a hedge fund? Where do you live now? Where do you want to live?
My understanding is Artificial intelligence is for the unsolved problems and Machine Learning is what they call the solved problems. For AI, unless you can create an artificial human it won't be solved.
Well, try ai-class.com first and see how you like it . You might as well not like this field. Or you might apply it in physics. AI is just a tool to do other things.
I've read some of your writings. Just going to say, maybe look at politics, but never forget the reasons why you went into it in the first place.
Get a job in MLOS (Machine Learning, Optimization and Statistics), leave AI to Popular Science magazine.
here are some links
http://www.ml-class.org/
http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-good-res...
http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-good-lea...
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-resources-for-learni...
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-resources-to-learn-a...