I've really got nearly zero respect for Kurzweil as a theorist. He made a bunch of predictions for 2010 in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. When 2010 came around he graded his predictions and gave himself very high marks, but when I found a copy of the book and read what he'd actually written I found that he'd had to re-write his predictions substantially in order to count them as succeeding.

As far as I can tell the only way to become popular as a futurist is to lay out predictions for the future in far more detail and with far more certainty than could every be justified.