Wilbur Wright thought that heavier-than-air flight was fifty years away; two years later, he helped build the first heavier-than-air flyer. This is because it often feels the same when the technology is decades away and when the technology is a year away: in either case, you don’t yet know how to solve the problem.
This pattern is common and I think it has a common simple explanation: experts arrive in a field by absorbing the current knowledge, like seeds developing fruit they blossom with a variable crop of fresh ideas, they eventually then harvest by publishing/testing (at varying rate depending on funding) said ideas, exhausting their pool and then eventually fading out. Polling experts in a developing field about future breakthroughs is then always mostly useless because almost by definition you are polling those whose ideas have already mostly failed, and new success ultimately comes from the unproven, those with novel ideas untested.
This pattern is common and I think it has a common simple explanation: experts arrive in a field by absorbing the current knowledge, like seeds developing fruit they blossom with a variable crop of fresh ideas, they eventually then harvest by publishing/testing (at varying rate depending on funding) said ideas, exhausting their pool and then eventually fading out. Polling experts in a developing field about future breakthroughs is then always mostly useless because almost by definition you are polling those whose ideas have already mostly failed, and new success ultimately comes from the unproven, those with novel ideas untested.