Luckily we have Mr Carrico to address those (warning: he is very rude) http://amormundi.blogspot.nl/2009/01/condensed-critique-of-t... Techno-utopianism and futurism does have quite a few critics.

Anyway, I've read two of Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan). Taleb seems to be filled with nostalgia at times. He dreams of a simple, slow life. He regards the news and up-to-dateness of modern mediums mostly as 'noise', and even takes a stab at people that read the newspaper in transit every day.

What is also interesting is that he rails against people that try to predict the future because of black swans, the unknown unknowns. Still, this is the second article by him about the future that I read. And it's just as boring as the last one.

Technophiles have the tendency to exaggerate what change the future will bring, but conservatives like him fill the predictions with good-old-timesness. It's wishful thinking just as much.

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).