As I see it Kurzweil's predictions were mostly based on his understanding of computational complexity and extrapolating the development trend in semiconductor technlogy - and figuring out which things are practical. But still, extrapolation based on more or less theoretically well understood concrete principles.
I'm not sure if there is yet anything well understood in the human body. Just mapping the genome will give us very little hints of the consequences in the physical body. Even figuring out how a protein folds is still considered a computational achievement (I think?).
Chess is a concrete computational system. Even most tasks that we have can be considered to be constrainable to a well defined system (hence the AI will replace a lot of manual workforce).
But until such a well defined "theory of human body" exists, computers are quite helpless to create it for us. Just adding computers will not magically make us understand everything better.
Thus, just quoting "exponential development" will certainly provide nice food for thought but will not offer any practical footholds for concrete progress.
I'm not sure if there is yet anything well understood in the human body. Just mapping the genome will give us very little hints of the consequences in the physical body. Even figuring out how a protein folds is still considered a computational achievement (I think?).
Chess is a concrete computational system. Even most tasks that we have can be considered to be constrainable to a well defined system (hence the AI will replace a lot of manual workforce).
But until such a well defined "theory of human body" exists, computers are quite helpless to create it for us. Just adding computers will not magically make us understand everything better.
Thus, just quoting "exponential development" will certainly provide nice food for thought but will not offer any practical footholds for concrete progress.