Comment by tim333

I think it was fairly easy to predict the chess thing. You could even plot a graph of Elo rating of chess programs by year and see it would intersect the human max of 2800 or so at some point. I think some polish guy did that before Kurzweil and predicted 1988. Some of Kurzweil's stuff isn't that original and what it original with him is often a bit nutty. He's a good populariser though.

More controversially I'm not sure AGI is that hard to predict either. I wrote about it in my college entry essay 37 years ago and didn't thing it takes any great intellect to say if the brain is a biological computer and electronic computers get more powerful exponentially then at some point electronic ones will overtake. Of course a basic chess algorithm is fairly simple and an AGI one will be far more complicated but it can't be that mega complicated to fit in a limited amount of DNA building proteins building cells.