In the late 1980s, Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would defeat the world’s best chess players a decade later. Garry Kasparov derided the idea. In 1997, Mr Kasparov took on IBM’s Big Blue and lost.

Mr Kurzweil’s extraordinary 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, is occasionally so outlandish that I constantly had to remind myself how many of his forecasts have already happened.