I fear that society at large will not really get past this denial you speak of until we have a humanoid type of AI, something that the standard, non-science oriented person can look at and say, "Wow this is uncanny." It will need to be shoved right in their face in the most blatant way imaginable.

Advances in natural language processing, metaheuristics and machine learning, as examples, are clearly steps toward the "holy grail" but to the average person it is nigh meaningless.