For a brilliant intro into his non-fiction essays, I can't recommend The Left Hand of the Electron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_the_Electron) enough. Snagged my copy from the peace corps library in Liberia. Ahem.

Thanks for the book tip, I've just found the pdf!

For others interested, here's the list with all his works:

http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html

I'm just reading

http://www.asimovreviews.net/Books/Book225.html

It's available in iBooks.

I wasn't saying anything negative about Asimov, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the man, it was more about the contrast between someone supposed to write fiction and the other supposed to predict the future and how one got thing righter than the other. The irony seemed rich.

Asimov and Kurzweil seem (to me) to be making similar predictions in terms of the gap between their predictions and the status quo. 50 years is probably a lot easier for that kind of progress to be made than 10. Did Asimov make any 10 year predictions? Not knocking either, but it would be interesting to see if Asimov had trouble with a shorter horizon.

I don't consider Kurzweil being able to make an good predictions in any time frame, his ideas are more a wishful thinking than showing the real understanding. I believe his major trait is just extrapolating wrongly, like here:

http://xkcd.com/605/

Still I admit that by expecting and actively promoting "more" he inspires people who otherwise wouldn't be motivated.