I remember hearing from some old salty in the oil business that geologists are the wrong people to ask about peak oil. They always understimated future discoveries. The ones that tended to get it right were finaciers and investors.
The idea is that geologists have their noses down in the details of practical, useful knowledge that they have or can get. Financiers don't really know anything, just that wells have been found in the past. They just model things like exploration money, the rate and quality of new finds, oil prices, production costs...
There could be somethng similar here. The real technology people see mostly problems. All the stuff that would need to be solved, that they have no idea how to solve. The fact that we don't even know what intelligence is. The frauds making audacious claims.
Outsiders see drones, self driving cars, spam filters, google search, chess, face recognition, translation, chatbots^. They see that voice recognition now works. I reckon medical diagnosis might do something soon. In any case, it seems that pone way or another, these add up to something. ...just as a hunch.
Obviously I don't know the answer and this whole comment is based on an anecdote that may not even be true. Still, I don't discount the possibility that the unwashed masses are right.
^just kidding