You don't have to be an AI researcher to give serious consideration to Kurtzweil's statement. We have already built machines that are hugely smarter than human

You don't have to be an AI researcher to give serious consideration to Kurtzweil's statement. We have already built machines that are hugely smarter than human beings, albeit in somewhat limited domains (Google search index is one big example). It is only a matte of time (and economics) before those limited domains become general enough that we will be able to say that, "yes, indeed, the computer so-and-so is generally intelligent." We humans are very good at being humans, so I think it is unfair to judge the intelligence of a machine by how similar it is to us.