Well they should be in a better position to know than I, but I suspects the issue hinges on how we define "50 years ahead".
Perhaps they are talking about 50 years ahead of adoption by the commercial industry or some such?
I would also have to say it's not necessarily linear, and that modern companies are more willing to adopt advanced technology faster than they were in the past.
Also, I wonder if they are taking into account the non linearity of research and development? The more we learn, the faster we develop new technologies. 50 years later at a linear progression is a very different thing than 50 years later at an exponential progression.
I happen to know the Navy is very interested in Fusion propulsion systems for their ships because they had/are funding the Polywell fusion reactor research. If the technology is viable, we will likely have fusion powered ships, planes, trucks, whatever in much less than 50 years.
50 years advanced from now? It's unfathomable.
Warp drive maybe.
“50 years” means 50 years beyond what we think possible now. Applies to all categories. And remember that it goes beyond just that to 50 years beyond what we can imagine. The first question they are positing is: imagine anything could be possible in 50 years, not if it is something commercially viable, but just possible. The second question is imagine the wildest things you could dream up, then imagine 50 years beyond that ...
Not companies. Companies have nothing to do with the concepts here - this goes into the realms of secret think tanks like the Institute for Advanced Study used to be back in the 40s and 50s.
Remember James Clerk Maxwell and Nicola Tesla - what if their works were picked up in various ‘black projects’ and expanded 40 years ago? Where would that leave us today? Maxwell, in particular, would put us beyond the current realm of imaginative hard SciFi; food for thought or the beginning of a budding interest in almost inconceivable mathematics ...
80 years of funding for ‘black projects’ is likely, according to some, to have produced a totally separate culture about which we peons have no clue - with only a few people crossing over like Johnson. Which would explain many otherwise mysterious comments made by those people.
Where is this ‘black’ culture you ask? There was a mention 10-15 years back that all the important stuff once housed at Area 51 was moved to an underground city somewhere in Utah.
Russia still operates several - the largest, I think, is in the Urals several hundred feet down, housing several thousand or more people with a direct underground train to Moscow. The US has several, I was told by an old now passed mil friend, as large as that or larger. Secrets are, by and large, only secrets from the populace - not from other countries.
Fusion research is a known-about future tech everyone is interested in achieving and using in one form or another.
Gotta love this stuff.