Kurzweil is right in that acceleration of technological change, well beyond our ability to derail it, is a reality. He's made some very good predictions but he fails to grasp this is actually bad. People like him have a religious optimism about a hallucinated end point. Technology is permanent revolution, changing everything.
History is increasingly a poor guide to the future. Look at the magnitude of change in the past century. To say there's even remote consensus on recent world history is laughable. We've had all of human existence to answer some very basic questions, our deepest and most important ones, that we are still no closer on. Much of what is happening now is beyond anyone's grasp, and will continue to elude us further as it complexifies. Everything is more unprecedented as each moment passes, the only thing we can predict is that it will be unpredictable.
We have no idea what we're doing, and no way to know, and no way to slow things down to the point where we can catch our breath and figure it out, before it changes again. We don't understand consciousness at all, we don't have a good sociology or psychology yet, not even close. Scientists preach anti-philosophy while science is in crisis. Philosophy, and all our institutions, are also in crisis.
We have absolutely no idea what the effects of being born into social media, its full and total integration, are going to be, nor the Panoptic Big Data algorithmic surveillance state that is emerging. These changes alter what we are seeking to observe under our feet, by altering our language, our shared meanings, our consciousness, our institutions, the power dynamics, the social fabric. This subtly alters what is sayable, what is thinkable. It's entering our brains more and more directly, and scientists can't even imagine why this might be a bad idea.
There is no escape, and no amount of reading, art, "legitimate" discourse, political organizing, browsing Sup Forums or ayahuasca is going to change that.
