[ambler0]

I think your comparison to arguments about religion is apt. Many of the opponents to Kurzweil's ideas remind me of those whose opposition to the possibility of a godless universe amounts to, "I can't imagine it, so I don't believe it."

[john_b]

On the other hand, Kurzweil (at least in his essays and articles) often ignores the question of what a fair null hypothesis is for the possibility of the singularity. I think his gift for creating a compelling vision tends to make people forget that the null hypothesis for a scientific assertion is doubt.

Kurzweil provides both high level general evidence (like improvements in computation) and low level, domain-specific evidence (like the discussion about the pancreas) to support his claims, but none of that justifies the use of the word "law" in "law of accelerating returns". He attempts an analogy with thermodynamic laws and how they are derived from underlying statistical principles, but there are no underlying fundamental principles of human innovation and progress that are in any way comparable to the certainty and universality of physical laws. This, I think, is why a lot of people (myself included) have a hard time taking him seriously. He tries to apply the same kind of formal analysis that works well in science to human beings and the complex, highly non-scientific processes that underly innovation today. The bottom line is that, until the singularity occurs, human beings will still be needed to build ever more complex and powerful systems, but human beings do not progress at anything close to an exponential rate.