The next king of the hill

F#, R, D, Go.

Which will dominate the industry in the future?

If you know C and keep up with the news you should already have a good guess.

People seem to think that AI should be this elusive magic
I don't think that, I know that AI is elusive fucking magic, because that's how I define the concept of AI. If it ain't hypercomputation, it's shit. And if hypercomputation doesn't exist, then everything is shit.