Maybe it's just a matter of perspective. I agree that this is something that's been worked on for decades; however, it's also the case that progress seems to be getting faster. The AI field now has a problem where AIs are improving faster than benchmarks can measure them, and new benchmarks get saturated almost as soon as they're introduced. [1]
The human mind is a mystery, we don't know how it works. But it works somehow. There are some algorithms it's using under the hood, as mysterious as they may be. We might be searching blindly in the dark, grabbing hold of anything that feels promising, and we're probably still far away from the "right way" of doing it, of getting a computer to think the way humans think. And I'm sure we won't find the whole thing at once; maybe we'll have reverse-engineered the visual cortex, but not the vestibular system, which perhaps works completely differently. But if we were getting closer to stumbling on the right solution, that rapid saturation of benchmarks is the kind of behaviour I would expect to see.
[1]: "Foundation models and the next era of AI", Microsoft Research, https://youtu.be/HQI6O5DlyFc?t=958
