This prognostication, he suggests, is anchored in technology already available today. "Right now you can take an information file and turn that into a movie or book or sound recording.

Those things used to be physical products. They're now just information."

The law of accelerating return

A central motif in "The Singularity is Near" is the "law of accelerating return."

Technology's progression, notes Kurzweil, is exponential and not linear.

"If I count 30 steps linearly I get to 30. If I count exponentially -- 2, 4, 8, 16 -- I get to a billion," the futurist notes, and suggests that the concept of technology's exponential growth is often not fully grasped -- which is why long-term forecasts fall substantially short of reality.

Accelerating return is also the reason why paradigm shifts that in times past took decades or even centuries are now occurring every few years.

In the field of IT, Kurzweil says, the stupendous growth in the price-performance of computing reflects the same principle.

This is the amount of computation -- either bits of memory or computes you get per second, per dollar.

"It took three years to double the price-performance of computing in 1900, two years in the middle of the 20th century, 12 months in the year 2,000. It's now down to 11 months."

By Kurzwellian logic, "when scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in today's terms)."

And as pie-in-the-sky as many of the concepts articulated in "The Singularity is Near" may seem ("a cool, zero-energy-consuming computer...which is abut 10 trillion times more powerful than all human brains on Earth") Kurzweil can argue he is merely extrapolating from established data.