I am familiar with the survey you presented and can only point out that if you had passed out the same survey back in the late 80s when I was in the field it wo

I am familiar with the survey you presented and can only point out that if you had passed out the same survey back in the late 80s when I was in the field it would have had a similar result. The long-term estimates of people whose current paycheck depends on these long-term estimates being achievable are basically useless BS. The rate of progress in AI is actually not "incredible" and is in-line with the advances in hardware which have made old research suddenly applicable to a wider range of problems. As someone on the outside looking in it may appear as though magic is happening, but the field is mostly progressing at an only marginally faster rate than it has done over the previous few decades. What has changed significantly to lead to all of these "incredible" results you see is the larger data sets available and improved hardware upon which to run massively parallel but weakly connected computations. As for why AI can't invent or improvise I am simply suggesting that so far we have only seen optimization and in fact invention and similar feats may actually require more work than we realize. A statistical simulation (based upon a huge corpus) of how a human would respond to various situations is NOT general intelligence, and so far you are just making hand-waving assumptions that paper over a large number of hard problems that no one has a clue how to solve.