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V_V comments on AI timeline predictions: are we getting better? - Less Wrong
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The interesting part is looking back and figuring out if they are in the same reference class as AGI.
Nuclear fusion is always 30-50 years in the future, so it seems very much AI-like in this respect.
I can't find many dates for space colonization, but I'm under the impression that is typically predicted either in the relatively near future (20-25 years) or in the very far future (centuries, millennia).
"Magical" nanotechnology (that is, something capable of making grey goo) is now predicted in 30-50 years, but I don't know how stable this prediction has been in the past.
AGI, fusion, space and nanotech also share the reference class of cornucopian predictions.
Although there have been some pretty successful cornucopian predictions too: mass production, electricity, scientific agriculture (pesticides, modern crop breeding, artificial fertilizer), and audiovisual recording. By historical standards developed countries do have superabundant manufactured goods, food, music/movies/news/art, and household labor-saving devices.
Were those developments predicted decades in advance? I'm talking about relatively mainstream predictions, not predictions by some individual researcher who could have got it right by chance.
Reader's Digest and the like. All you needed to do was straightforward trend extrapolation during a period of exceptionally fast change in everyday standards of living.