> You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm".
I wish this were true, but it's gotten a new lease on life with Nick Bostrom's book and the various high-profile people who have been influenced by it (like Elon Musk and Bill Gates), so there's a bit of a boomlet around singularity speculation again.
But that's where I disagree with you. I think Bostrom et al's take on things is correct (at least potentially), and has nothing at all to do with the Kurzweilian norm. Bostrom's argument requires far fewer background assumptions.
That said, for most of the arguments that modern-day thinkers talk about, accelerating technological progress is totally irrelevant. You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm".
If you're talking about the arguments around technological unemployment, it doesn't matter if tech is accelerating - we could, for example,, over the course of the next e.g. 30 years, replace 50% of human jobs. This might be "slower" in some sense than previous tech changes, but it doesn't change the bottom line. (note: these are made up numbers to illustrate a point, I have no good guess at the real numbers, but lots of smart people, including economists, think it's a problem we will face soon-ish).
If you're talking about the arguments around "unfriendly AI", then again, it is totally immaterial wether tech in general is accelerating. All that you need to believe in order to worry is that eventually, at some point, we will be able to create a machine that thinks, and it is not automatically guaranteed to share our values.