Be that as it may, Kurzweil has a decades long history of making predictions, often considered absolutely nuts by the press and in some very high profile cases,

Be that as it may, Kurzweil has a decades long history of making predictions, often considered absolutely nuts by the press and in some very high profile cases, technology even beat his predictions. I don't think there's anyone else with as good of a track record when it comes to predicting far off technical advances. (e.g. saying in the 80s that a chess AI beating the top ranked human by 1998 or that the human genome would be sequenced by the year 2000).