I feel like half the blame is on the survey itself, which apparently had all kinds of weird/arbitrary questions and asked for probabilities framed in 3 sets: 10 years, 20 years, and 50 years.

When you ask someone to put different probabilities into 3 timeframes like this, they're going to be biased to lowering at least the first one just to show an increasing probability over time, with the first being 10 years away and the last being 50 it makes sense that every time they do the survey their result is going to make it seem like everything beyond what is already public and well known is going to take forever to happen.

For the second part of the blame, I'll cite this example:

"AI Writes a novel or short story good enough to make it to the New York Times best-seller list."
"6% probability within - 50 years"

not sure who answered that, but they're probably an "expert"
just sayin'