Too ambitious? I'm thinking 2020 will look pretty much like 2010 which looks pretty much like 2000 :-(
* Computers will become invisible and invade our environment -- woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture, and so forth.
* We'll have very high-bandwidth, wireless connections to the Internet at all times.
* Displays will be embedded into our eyeglasses and contact lenses, and images will be projected directly onto our retinas.
* Similar tiny devices will project auditory environments.
* "Beams" of audio that only a specific person can hear will be projected from a distance.
* We'll have augmented reality devices that can recognize a person and remind us of his name.
* Real-time translation of foreign languages (subtitles on the world) will exist.
* Virtual assistants will step forward when they see us struggling to find a piece of information. Kurzweil's example has us struggling find "that actress ... who played the princess, or was it the queen ... in that movie with the robot." Your virtual assistant then whispers in your ear that it was "Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala in Stars Wars, episodes 1, 2, and 3."
I'll give him the "pervasive, invisible computers" point. Though they're not yet woven into our clothing, Kurzweil has pointed out in recent talks that smartphones such as the iPhone fulfill the same role. Ditto on high-bandwidth, permanent connections to the Internet -- the 3G connectivity of smartphones meets this criterion. Augmented reality applications, such as New York Nearest Subway, are available in a nascent form on smartphones. Real-time translation of foreign languages is also becoming a reality: consider Google's recently-announced automated transcription of subtitles for YouTube videos, along with their automated translation into foreign languages. Shakier are his claims regarding displays embedded into eyewear, "personal beams" of audio, and intelligent virtual assistants. One can point to experimental implementations of each, but none have been widely adopted.
I think Kurzweil's ideas generally have merit, even if the man himself comes off as overly optimistic. The technological singularity argument essentially boils down to the question of whether humanity will create an intelligence that far exceeds its own. To do so, we must possess both the desire and the means to create such an entity. I think we have both -- our desire is unquestionable, for the applications of an artificial general intelligence are far too great across all aspects of human existence for us to turn away; the means to do so will also exist, as hardware and software are both progressing at a phenomenal rate, and they must eventually cross the threshold necessary for intelligence. Whether we will realize such an intelligence on Kurzweil's aggressive schedule is less certain. Given that his predictions for 2010 made five years ago are substantially inaccurate, I am less inclined to believe his claim that we will achieve a "technological singularity" in exactly (or even around) 2029. Other ideas freely expressed by Kurzweil, such as the belief that he'll be able to resurrect a simulacrum of his dead father once this technology singularity is reached, make him sound, well, nuts. Still, murky as the details and timeline may be, I think Kurzweil's general vision of humanity's future is compelling.
We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot.
The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.
Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information.
Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information.
iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here.
And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere you look. They're just hard to see sometimes, because they're "normal" now.
* Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s.
* Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.
Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.
There are now many websites I can go to watch video (live or archived) at a higher resolution than I used to watch "real" TV content at, and a comparable frame-rate. Choice of content to watch is now almost unmeasurable, whereas it used to be I could count my options on the fingers of one hand.
Most of this progress is just due various forms of exponential growth and decay (cost of bandwidth and storage, speed of cpus, etc). It was probably pretty easy to predict, but I wouldn't categorize the change as a mere bugfix.
Compare that to the difference between 2000 and 1990, when the Commodore 64 and dot matrix printers still had some market share.
You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices.
Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently.
Cellphones went from bricks that cost thousands to cheap things that everybody has.
Cars now have more computing power than computers had recently.
We're building massive databases of genetic information and annotating it rapidly. The cost of sequencing base pairs of DNA is dropping very rapidly.
But people still think nothing is changing.
10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke.
10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs.
10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space.
10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete.
10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.
I had an mp3 player in 2000. Creative released a 6GB hard drive based player in 2000 with which you'd still do fine today. It was Napster's heyday. I had a cable connection very capable of delivering video on the internet. Sure, the majority of streaming was porn sites, but the capability was there. I was using Google then, like I am now. The Startac was released in 1996. By 2000 there were many LCD phones, and the BlackBerry was available.
I don't see how a tech-savvy person could not have lived a very similar life in 2000. Look at 1990 with no graphical internet (for instance) and qualitatively less computer capability, and there really isn't any comparison in rate of change.