When the Singularity arrives in 2045, Ray Kurzweil will finally be infallible… One of Kurzweil’s arguments in his defense: he predicted the Internet would “take off” in the late 1980s, when few people believed that.

(Actually, a lot of college campuses and even some high schools were actively on the net in the late 1980s, and you already had networks of FTP sites and Gophers and so on.) On the other hand, computing has progressed much faster than a lot of people would have predicted a couple decades ago — so it’s not a bad time to be an unalloyed optimist. […]