Kurzweil has been getting it right because his near-term predictions are pretty safe bets, many of them true in some form even in 2000. For examples,

* Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the brain through both destructive and non-invasive scans.

* Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.

* People can talk to their computer to give commands.

He has crafted his long term predictions such a way that 8 out of 10 are pretty trivial and 2 most likely to go wrong. No wonder he often claims 80% success rate. For example, for 2020 he is predicting trivial stuff like this which has been in works already since he started predicting:

* Computers are embedded everywhere in the environment (inside of furniture, jewelry, walls, clothing, etc.).

* People experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to their retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), users can remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet.

* People are able to wirelessly access the Internet at all times from almost anywhere

* Nanotechnology is more capable and is in use for specialized applications, yet it has not yet made it into the mainstream. "Nanoengineered machines" begin to be used in manufacturing.

However his non-trivial predictions are almost guerenteed to be false:

* By 2020, there will be a new World government.

* The basic needs of the underclass are met.

* Most human workers spend the majority of their time acquiring new skills and knowledge.

* Phone calls entail three-dimensional holographic images of both people.

The point is predicting long term future is not just hard, it's impossible. But there is an expectation from long term future that sets our sense of progress and achievements.

I didn't mean the futuristic almanac style predictions. Kurzweil's main point is that mankind's evolution and abilities are exponential, or that Moore's law is not a special case but rather the norm in scientific evolution. His charts on stuff not related to transistor count do hold up for the near future.

More important than that, in this context, Kurzweil shows that scientific evolution has not stagnated or decelerated, in the last few decades, as the parent comment was proposing. Much to the contrary, the current pace is faster than in the past.