The point of that comment wasn't to praise predicting with trends. It was to show an example where experts are sometimes overly pessimistic and not looking at the big picture.

When people say that current AI sucks, and progress is really hard, and they can't imagine how it will scale to human level intelligence, I think it's a similar thing. They are overly focused on current methods and their shortcomings and difficulties. They aren't looking at the general trend that AI is rapidly making a lot of progress. Who knows what could be achieved in decades.

I'm not talking about specific extrapolations like Moore's law, or even imagenet benchmarks - just the general sense of progress every year.