Academic futurism has low status. This causes people interested in futurism to ignore those academics and instead listen to people who talk about futurism after gaining high status via focusing on other topics. As a result, the people who are listened to on the future tend to be amateurs, not specialists. And this is why "we" know a lot less about the future than we could.
I don't think that's the case. Most people who are listened to on the future don't tend to speak to an audience primarily consisting of futurists.
There are think tanks who employee people to think about the future and those think tanks tend generally to be quite good at influencing the public debate.
I also don't think that academic has any special claim to be specialists about the future. When I think about specialists on futurism names like Stewart Brand or Bruce Sterling.
I don't think that's the case. Most people who are listened to on the future don't tend to speak to an audience primarily consisting of futurists.
This is a very important and general point. While it is important to communicate ideas to a general audience, generally excessive communication to general audiences at the expense of communication to peers should be "bad news" when it comes to evaluating experts. Folks like Witten mostly just get work done, they don't write popular science books.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.