Remind me why anyone listens to Kurzweil? Anyone can read a bunch of sci-fi and make wild, scattershot extrapolations into the future, and do as well or better than he does.
I think the extreme negative or positive outcomes are both unlikely long-tail events but having a "singularity" that benefits the wellbeing of humanity is definitely worth striving for.
If it even happens it will not be shared equally. A regular person will have to login with a Facebook account with the right amount of social credit to vicariously experience a part of the ascended's experience, with ads. And no, trickle down isn't real.
A certain type of person is basically wired for it.
I think that the reality is that worldviews are necessarily reductionist at some point. Think about just literally looking down a road far into the distance. If you can see far enough the stuff at the end of that road just looks like a tiny dot which you can't make out.
No one can actually predict the future. Some people like me think that technology will probably shortly change things dramatically.
I would be interested to hear your worldview and predictions for 2029 and the 2030s. But just a warning, I am going to classify those predictions as beliefs.
To give a particular example, the exponential growth of computing power has been a close-enough match to exponential since Kurzweil became famous: It was about 20 years ago that Apple was boasting that their latest PowerMac was banned from export to Cuba because a 1 gigaflops computer counted as a weapon, now they boast their phones do 11 teraflops — compatible with 1.5 year doubling time.
(That said: while I have met someone who expected the exponential to continue past single atom transistors, I do expect it to stop soon-ish; superconducting/3D/quantum computing may replace classical transistors, but I never expect to see multiple transistors on a single atom).
It works until it doesn't.
Extrapolation outside your dataset is only a problem if you take it too far, and how far is “too far” depends on how well you modelled reality with your dataset in the first place.
But this energy is not infinite. Despite all innovations in solar/wind, and assuming efficient storage that does not exist yet, EU won't be able to absorb a 3% decrease in oil+gas importations by 2030. Rystad (https://www.rystadenergy.com/), pre-covid, was forecasting a 2 to 8% decrease in oil and gas import from the EU according to the think tank "the shift project" [0][1].
I won't talk about manpower much because there is still a chance that nothing more heavy than Covid will hit us in the near future, but meals will be hard to get this year in eastern Africa and while this year India did not suffer as much as in 2019, another drought like 2019 next year would be even more disastrous. For information, this winter could have been worse for Africa than 2011, luckily the wildfires and drought in russia were localized further north than a decade ago.
But well, we still have two silver bullets: fusion and renewable hydrolyse.
[0] https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Study... complete data analysis
[1] https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fig40... short graph.
In general, people do not adhere to the egalitarian message board nerd ethos that all opinions are equally important. The opinions on technological progress of someone who has invented as much technology as Kurzweil carry extra weight.
(I agree that he's wrong about, you know, a ton of stuff...)