I see a lot of people taking for granted the nearby existence of AI superintelligence that will save or destroy us. It seems these people take for granted multiple technological paradigm shifts that will level-up the AI in unforeseen ways: Neural nets/GPT-3 -> ... <unknown paradigm shifts> ... -> AGI superintelligence.

How do pragmatic and scientifically-minded people end up stretching their beliefs across such knowledge voids, and not only that, but they take for granted that those things will manifest in reality?