AI What do people think the future will bring?

Believe it or not the quest for artificial intelligence (AI) began over 70 years ago, with the idea that computers will one day be able to think like us. New approaches to AI coupled with advances in technology in the last 25-30 years mean that we may be close to realizing this. "Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold." How realistic is Kurzweil's prediction?