Perhaps without intending to, you've cited a pretty appropriate example of overconfident pessimism. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus is most responsible for this portrayal of AI research in the '50s and '60s. He made a career of insisting that advances in AI would never come to pass, famously predicting that computers couldn't become good at chess because it required "insight", and routinely listing off what he believed were uniquely human qualities that couldn't be embodied in computers, always in the form of underdefined terms such as intuition, insight, and other such terms.

Many of the things AI does now are exactly the type of things that doomsayers explicitly predicted would never happen, because they extrapolated from limited progress in the short term to absolute declarations over the infinite timeline of the future.

There's a difference between the outer limits of theoretical possibility on the one hand, and instant results over the span of a couple new cycles, and it's unfortunate that these get conflated.