You can go as long as needed. I did LASIK a few years back, and with corneal surgery you can't rub your eyes for what amounts to eternity (I guess it was a couple of months). Anyhow, past the initial couple of weeks, when you must keep that standing order forever present in your brain, it falls out of habit and you never ever do it (except when asleep, a situation that requires special protection).

It's all a matter of perspective. You don't have to be the richest of the rich to access telecommunications, and this would be considered part of any paradise ancient people would design. The same can be said for self-powered movement (engines of any kind), computing, or fast long distance transportation. Are we in a paradise yet? Not by a long shot. Are we -- the average human on earth -- better than a thousand years ago? Of course!

You are probably referring to Hubbert's Peak. His prediction was for peak production in the US, and was mostly on target (which is admirable for a prediction 50 year ahead). The curve has been adapted to several regions, with correct predictions. The peak global production, using Hubbert's curve, is predicted for 2005, and it seems to have indeed ocurred.

Mind you, peak production isn't the same as "running out". There's still a lot of oil out there. It's just that now it's clear we must find an alternative, and we have a couple of decades left.

All of those affirmations without quoting a single stat. I've done the legwork before, in all comments up to here. I'm not doing it again. Stay ignorant all you want. Just note that I picked up the last 26 years. It was not random.

Except he predicted it would be 40 years in the future and the due date was never postponed.

By all means, feel free to disregard all other metrics that are non-hardware and are on schedule.

His speculations, ten years after they were made, are right on the money. So, he's a few grades above sci-fi.

Please provide some metrics. It is expectable that better hardware leads to better software, and I lean to believe software follows a similar exponential curve unless proven otherwise. Remember that humans are notoriously poor at naturally spotting exponential curves.

We can now model plastics much better than before, and that leads to all kinds of new materials in use. Software. Car engines had tremendous evolution in efficiency in the last decades, mostly because we can now model with increasing accuracy the chemical process of fuel ignition in the confined chamber of the cylinder. That's software (the physics theory is over 50 years old). We have finer resolution MRI scans, using lower and lower radiation, due to better software.

Are these advances caused by better hardware or better software? Both, but don't discount software here.

If you are referring to our ability to model the transformation process between DNA and cells, there's a lot of legwork to be done, yes. However, this legwork is to be helped by an increasing amount of tech. Heck, if MRI scans get another resolution jump we'll be able to spot firing of individual neural units -- now, that'd help understanding how brains work!

Test your theory against US data. Infant mortality rate in '80 was 13 per thousand births. In '06 was 6 per thousand births. In a thousand people set, you had seven datapoints that lived zero years (worst scenario case) and now show up as living 80 years (again, worst case scenario). The effect of better infant mortality rates comes down to 80*7/1000 years=7 months (average scenarios produce 5 months). Meanwhile, in the same period, life expectancy went from 74 to 78 years.

Better infant mortality rates explain 14% of the increase in life expectancy. Where does the rest come from? Better car safety? Perhaps, but certainly with lower effect than infant mortality. The rest? Medical technology.

It hasn't happened decades later because the singularity date isn't past yet. You may criticize Kurzweil, which I do, but you should read what he says before criticizing vaguely. As it is, you sound like a misinformed radicalist. Just so you gain something from this post: a) I think he predicts the singularity to happen near 2030; b) He predicts humans will 'fuse' with machines, not that machines will replace humans.

Moore's law, the base of his argument that technology is evolving exponentially is pretty much on schedule. We are now on the Petaflop (10^15) range, with the transistor count following the predicted exponential.

Cost of DNA sequencing, another of his examples, is today at 0.000008(USD) per base pair. Fits the curve.

RAM cost is now at 28000kB/USD, also fitting the curve

GDP per capita also is within schedule (note that the scale is logarithmic), even with the wealth transfer east (which is bound to be limited in time to ten more years give or take)

And, lastly, the core of all atacks on Kurzweil, so is life expectancy on track.

You may still believe these exponentials will hit some kind of ceiling somehow. That might be true. The numbers, however, support Kurzweil's theory. And predicting from the number of times Moore's law depletion was announced in the last twenty years, I'd wager my bets on Kurzweil.

Untrue. The genome gives you the instructions for a self-modifying program that eventually produces a human brain. All biology experiments so far seem to point to the fact that the DNA chain indeed contains all the information needed to build an organism.

Bah. Portugal is indeed below 2.1, much as most western countries. What most people seem to forget is that Portugal had 5 million people in the XIX century, and has 10 million today. We can shrink to half, and then pickup the slack. Growth isn't good by itself. Heck, we colonized the world when we were 2.5 million strong...

These numbers are probably similar all over Europe.