I am in the NLP mindset. I don't personally predict much progress on the front you described. Specifically, I think this is because industrial uses mesh well with the machine learning approach. You won't ask an app "where could I sit" because you can figure that out. You might ask it 'what brand of chair is that" though, at which point your app has to have some object recognition abilities.

So you mean agent in the sense that an autonomous taxi would be an agent, or an Ebay bidding robot? I think there's more work in economics, algorithmic game theory and operations research on those sorts of problems than in anything I've studied a lot of. These fields are developing, but I don't see them as being part of AI (since the agents are still quite dumb).

For the same reason, a program that figures out the heliocentric model mainly interests academics.

There is work on solvers that try to fit simple equations to data, I'm not that familiar.

I'm not asking for sexy predictions; I'm explicitly looking for more grounded ones, stuff that wouldn't win you much in a prediction market if you were right but which other people might not be informed about.