[throw_14JAS]

Because it's evidence is pretty straightforward: you can take wikipedia's list of important inventions and plot their frequency on a chart.

Of course, there are debates around which inventions count as significant. And there is recency bias.

Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate.

[the_af]

> "Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate."

Yes, I suppose that's the biggest thing with these "futurologists": their predictions are both tantalizing and easy to digest. I reserve the right to remain skeptical about any of these Silicon Valley religions though.

[throw_14JAS]

This is not limited to Silicon Valley. Every predictor since before Nostradamus has used this to their advantage. Those who haven't lose their audience, because predicting the future in concrete terms is really hard. So hard that nobody can do it regularly. Which causes people to stop listening.

[the_af]

Agreed!

What strikes me as particularly interesting about Silicon Valley and some techie circles -- as opposed to Nostradamus -- is that many of these people self-identify as hiperrational, agnostic, atheist or wary of traditional religions, yet here they are, building their own religions under a more palatable technological guise (I could list ideas like the Singularity, Super AI good or bad, immortality, "we're living in a simulation", "every problem in the world can be fixed with the right app", etc, but if the list of absurdities goes long enough I'm sure to hit some raw nerve, so I'll stop here).

These modern day Nostradamuses also tend to overinflate their own importance in the wider world. Outside of techie circles Kurzweil is a nobody, and the notion that his theories are some bar that other theories must somehow pass is laughable.

[tlarkworthy]

Sure, some people are not critical thinkers. I am not a worshipper of Kurzweil and not into Transhumanism, but I liked the historical charts he drew showing exponential acceleration over a wide time interval and tech domains. I feel his evidence of historical exponential progress was compelling, but what u do with that evidence is up to you. If you have something to say about that point I am happy to hear it, but you mostly seem to be lashing out at 'silicon valley' types which is a mischaracterization of who you are talking to. I respect Kurzweil because he is a real engineer, entrepreneur and a helper of those less fortunate (the blind in-particular).

[tlarkworthy]

U should look him up, futurology is only a slice of Kurzweil's enormous body of innovative work.

[solidasparagus]

Kurzweil is someone who does not understand where his expertise ends and makes bogus claims based on a poor understanding of non-computer science topics (see his claims about AGI + the human brain as an example). His claims are typically too generic to be wrong or he does mental gymnastics to claim his prediction was correct when it wasn't. Just read his analysis of how his predictions for 2009 did - https://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Far...

He claims he's right even when he's obviously wrong. He is not someone whose predictions should be blindly trusted.

[beat]

I think population growth also factors in. Population is leveling off. In the past century, the global population has quadrupled, so there are four times as many people to invent things in raw numbers alone. But global population will increase no more than 50% in the next century, which means we aren't creating a lot more inventors than we are now.

[davnicwil]

This is a good point, but also consider the proportion of the global population who have the opportunity to become inventors is hopefully going to grow over the next century. As a result, the absolute number of inventors may grow faster than by just growing the overall population size.