People always make these assertions about technology and I always just think how long it will be until they are proven wrong.

When people think of a future period, they intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for the period being considered. However, careful consideration of the pace of technology shows that the rate of progress is not constant, but it is human nature to adapt to the changing pace, so the intuitive view is that the pace will continue at the current rate. Even for those of us who have lived through a sufficiently long period of technological progress to experience how the pace increases over time, our unexamined intuition nonetheless provides the impression that progress changes at the rate that we have experienced recently. A salient reason for this is that an exponential curve approximates a straight line when viewed for a brief duration. So even though the rate of progress in the very recent past (e.g., this past year) is far greater than it was ten years ago (let alone a hundred or a thousand years ago), our memories are nonetheless dominated by our very recent experience. Since the rate has not changed significantly in the very recent past (because a very small piece of an exponential curve is approximately straight), it is an understandable misperception to view the pace of change as a constant. It is typical, therefore, that even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, extrapolate the current pace of change over the next ten years or hundred years to determine their expectations. This is why I call this way of looking at the future the “intuitive linear” view.

Although the ability of today’s computers to extract and learn knowledge from natural language documents is limited, their capabilities in this domain are improving rapidly. Computers will be able to read on their own, understanding and modeling what they have read, by the second decade of the twenty-first century. We can then have our computers read all of the world’s literature—books, magazines, scientific journals, and other available material. Ultimately, the machines will gather knowledge on their own by venturing into the physical world, drawing from the full spectrum of media and information services, and sharing knowledge with each other (which machines can do far more easily than their human creators).

-- Ray Kurzweil (1999) - Are We Spiritual Machines?