Raise your hands everyone who typed in Eliza clones in the mid-80s and thought you would solve general AI using BASIC in the not-too-distant future.
Later I played with various "expert system" stuff, then there was David L. Heiserman's "Machine Intelligence" and "Robot Intelligence" books...
I tried to understand early neural network stuff, but I could not get my then teenage head around it; in fact, none of it became clear until I took Andrew Ng's "ML Class" in 2011 as an adult (part of the key was understanding the role of linear algebra and matrix math in the system - among other things - that class was the first that explained it very clearly, and the use of octave was also a revelation).
Since that class, I've continued to play with ML/AI, mainly via a couple of courses thru Udacity (including their "self-driving car engineer nanodegree").
So - one could say I still have hope? Ha!