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No that's the great part about futurists, their predictions don't need to extrapolate on ANYTHING other than what people want to hear.

Ah, the fearful Luddite emerges from his cave to scream, Hogwash! As always.

Consider the following statements that were all valid not long ago:

Only a human can drive a car.

Only a human can master the game of chess.

Only humans can recognize an individual face.

Only humans can understand continuous speech.

Only a human musician can compose music in the style of Bach.

Only a human can improvise jazz.

Only a human can pilot an airplane.

Those were all true 15 years ago. They're all false now.

We went from having the "holy grail" of robotics being the ability to walk upright on their own just ten years ago, to having such robots not only walking, but jumping, dancing, balancing on one foot... and doing that while talking, following spoken commands, recognizing faces, able to get back up if you trip them, and run simple office errands--such robots were on sale at the end of last year.

That's the power of exponential growth, and that's what's at the core of Kurzweil's analysis. These exponential growth curves in computing technology, artificial intelligence software, nanotechnology, and biotechnology are going to completely change what it means to be human in a very short time period.

Kurzweil himself anticipated and predicted the exponential growth of the Arpanet evolving into the Internet as early as the late 70s/early 80s. Was he wrong?

Kurzweil predicted in the 80s that a computer would take the world chess championship by 1998. He was off by a year.

You really should avail yourself of the facts before posting such moronic generalities.

Sorry not fearful, not a Luddite. And you've got your dates wrong, 15 years ago a lot of that stuff was in place (Battle Chess anyone? still the best computer chess game ever IMHO... probably because it's the only one I can beat). Many of those problems were very close to being solved 15 years ago and the CW of everybody working on those problems (some of whom I knew) was that the barrier was computing power, they needed more RAM being accessed by faster CPUs.

CompuServe predicted the growth of networked computers in 1969, the difference is they put their money where their mouth was. By the late 70s (H&R Block bought CompuServe and moved them to the big time in 1977) it was obvious to anybody that recreationally networked computers was going to happen, the only question was who would own the protocol and the access points.

You really should learn to make posts without insults, nothing proves you should be ignored like the need to insult people.