I don't know where I first heard this but I believe it - people often overestimate the short term impact and underestimate the long term impact.
"Technological progress is easy to underestimate because it’s so counterintuitive to see how, for example, the philosophies of a guy who invented Polaroid film would go on to inspire the iPhone. Or how an 18th-century physicist would write a notebook that would set the foundations for a modern electrical system"
From more googling, it looks like this is called "Amara's Law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara