Given his belief in a technological singularity, and the underlying assumption that infinite, exponential technological expansion is not only possible but inevitable, this shouldn't surprise anyone. All of his predictions are essentially religious prophecies of the coming of the Eschaton.

Also, my impression of Kurzweil was that he didn't think in S-curves, but assumed technological progress follows an unbounded exponential curve - which is why he thinks he'll become immortal and bring his father back from the dead.

I suspect it's more that futurists think in terms of our engineering efforts being poured primarily into things that advance humanity, rather than the adtech, porn, entertainment, and media innovations that our Idiocracy actually seeks to reward.

Kurzweil could have been more accurate, had humanity been more prone to species improvement than, say, ever more addictive social media apps and ever more entertaining and higher resolution Netflix marathons.

The Age of Spiritual Machines is a catchier title and more interesting book than The Age of Cell Phones That Are Mostly Screen and You Can Call A Taxi With Them. There are plenty of people out there peddling much more luke-warm futures than Kurzweil; they just don't become well-known because safe, conservative predictions aren't that interesting.

A depressing thought I've had is that maybe we will reach a point where we can go no further due to biological limitations. Think about monkeys, they have primitive tools but are effectively stagnant.

It's an objective fact our progress has slowed

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601199/tech-slowdown-thre...

A monkey can't understand advanced mathematics. What if there are certain things about physics and the universe humans will never be able to grasp because we are simply too stupid as a species?

"AI" in its current form is like a child trying to make a car through imitation

I think we'll have to CRISPR ourselves smarter before we can really go full cybernetic augmentation