Given the amount of computation power any strong-AI system would doubtless need (I’m sure estimates vary but I think most people would agree there is no way you could write a self-conscious piece of software that ran in real-time on a single (existing or foreseeable in the next decade) processor, and probably you’d need hundreds or thousands at a minimum), my tendency would lean towards a language like E (or maybe Erlang, if you must be “fashionable”), since a lot of your effort and bugs will come from distributing the stuff properly (one good argument for E over Erlang here is that there is an E implementation built on Common Lisp, so you can implement your low-level or GOFAI code in CL (or in C/asm through your CL’s FFI, if need be, rather than having to drop directly to C as typical in Erlang).

Last I heard, the Singularity Institute is also attempting to build their AI system in Java. Which is one of the reasons I don’t think they’re ever going to get anywhere (not that an AI couldn’t be implemented in Java, but doing it with a very small number of people, and using a language that forces you to write a lot to say relatively little, seems like it doesn’t make things any easier).