It's very possible to predict that certain technologies will be created. It's just very difficult to predict precisely when.
For example, humans will almost certainly be able to re-create the human brain in some kind of hardware+software computer. We just don't know when. It might be much sooner or much later than you'd expect.
Merely being skeptical of progress isn't a convincing answer to the AI x-risk argument.
But the AI x-risk argument is about what happens when we have "real" AI that can actually think like humans but a million times faster.
There are no real experts on this and yet it does seem worth worrying about in advance.