Additionally, I am particularly bothered by his pairing of "evolution" with "progress". Evolution is not progress. Evolution is adaptation to the environment. As Stephen Jay Gould said, "Wooly mammoths are an evolved form of elephants, but that does not make wooly mammoths some cosmically better elephant, it's just better suited to the environment of Siberia, where it lived." The size of a transistor is not evolution, it's an extension of technological capability. Regardless even of that though, chip speed does not define technological progress. He goes from discussing the invention of fire and the wheel into computerized natural speech transcription without even taking a breath. I think he's extrapolating a little too far to really have credible predictions.

Lastly, I think there's an elephant in the room that he's not discussing here. I found his discussion very thought provoking on how technology progresses along a path until it runs out of space, and then there is a paradigm shift to allow further progress. Also, that this shift would naturally happen and there would be hardly a perceptible slow-down in the development of new technologies while this shift happened. That is how it was worked in the modern era, but what about Native Americans? They lived in the Americas for centuries and still never developed the wheel. Where was the paradigm shift there? How about writing? Most native american cultures had no written language. Those two technologies are enormously important, and certainly to those of us looking back at history, seem painfully obvious. Yet no paradigm shift occurred in native american cultures to create those technologies. I would like to hear Kurzweil explain why many ancient cultures have missed out on really important technologies like that, and why the world in the future will not miss similarly important ideas.

Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to put that out there and see what other people think about it.

Couldn't agree more. I find it intruiging that we have 6.5 billion optimally designed computers running around this world and we're still struggling to figure out how they work. I'm most interested in storage- how the brain seemingly has an endless capacity for memories, patterns, and associations- and how they're only accessible through certain modes; hypnosis, smells, sounds, and even sleep.