Historically, betting against Kurzweil hasn't been that good of a bet. He actually predicted the victory of a computer over the top human player as happening a

Historically, betting against Kurzweil hasn't been that good of a bet. He actually predicted the victory of a computer over the top human player as happening a year and a half later than it did. And yet in the 80s, when he made the prediction, it was largely rejected as a fantasy. People thought it wouldn't happen until decades later, if at all. Similarly, his support of and predictions related to the human genome project at its beginning drew a great deal of skepticism. Once again, he was right. Ditto for wearable computing (i.e. iPod touch). Kurzweil hasn't been right about everything, of course, but I think we'd be hard pressed to find another futurist with as good of a success rate with pubic predictions.