Yeah and travel near the speed of light, profitable fusion power, etc. are all theoretically possible too, but there's no indication they'll be practical in the near future. I don't object to the philosophical argument about the possibility, I'm saying thinking it's a near-term problem is a vast overestimation of our capability.

you can just observe the history of artificial intelligence and extrapolate

You actually can't just extrapolate data points and expect to predict the future without a really good mechanistic reason for why it's okay to do that. You can find countless learning materials with funny examples of over-extrapolation if you care to search for them.

In this case, we even have good reason to believe that the trend will not continue: with seventy years of research and straining the limits of our physical global production capacity, we have been able to replicate a miniscule fraction of human cognitive ability. With the current technological basis for AI, increases in cost and material requirements scale exponentially with increases in complexity. We have neither the resources in the entire world, nor the data, to replicate anything like human cognition with current architectures.

Of course, some breakthrough new technology may someday get us there, but we don't even know the theoretical basis for what it could be, and such profound changes take decades to go from academia to being practically applied.