Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.
and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.
I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!
FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.