It was bad enough in the 90's and early 00's when it was just him, but now he has kicked off an entire subculture. Kurzweil, de Grey, Hanson, Bostrom, Yudkowsky... all total cranks, and inexplicably popular among ostensibly intelligent people. It's embarrassing.
It seems like you're basically just saying that any attempt to predict the future is crankery. I think it would be a sad world if everyone just said "If I can't see it in front of my eyes and it isn't relevant to me today it's a waste of time"
Could you explain how you got that conclusion? Those people have overlapping views. For example, many of them are associated with the Future of Humanity Institute.
I think it's more reasonable to conclude that Analemma_'s "crank" comment refers to only those in that subculture, and cannot be extended to all people who are making "any attempt to predict the future."
"if you are always predicting disaster, then your predictions are neither useful nor credible, since you will be wrong most of the time as the long-term trend of the market is upward."
I think it's certain that Analemma_ does not consider this sort of future prediction as part of the same crankery subculture as Kurzweil, etc.
Well, I guess the question basically boils down to whether Analemma_ or you can name futurists that are not cranks... if you can't, then it seems to me the beef is with the notion of futurism itself, not with an individual subculture of futurists.
It seems to me that Analemma_ (and likely yourself) are proponents of the view "the future will be mostly the same as the present with minor inconsequential variations" which is a very sound and reasonable view to hold, but also kind of sad and unambitious in my view.
I think that "futurist" is only a subset of those who make "any attempt to predict the future". For example, the Congressional Budget Office routinely makes predictions about the future effect of new legislation, though they are never called "futurists".
As to your second paragraph, I have no idea of how you concluded that that is my view. As a kid I enjoyed James Burke's "Connections" which, quoting Wikipedia, "explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress", and that viewpoint has stayed with me.
Personally, I'm of the view that the late 1800s - the Belle Époque - contained much more significant technological and cultural changes than the late 1900s, and that people like Kurzweil end up minimizing the large transitions brought about by the telephone, phonograph, the vertical filing system, punched cards, lighting system, etc.
Concerning just lighting, Paris got the nickname "The City Of Light" because of its early installation (in the 1860s) of gas lighting, and night-life started around them, enabled first by limelight and then arc lamps.
He didn't even come up with the singularity idea. Vernor Vinge originated it, and a whole bunch of people were discussing it at the time. Kurzweil just jumped on the bandwagon and started hyping it up to such an extent that many mistakenly believe the idea originated with him. It didn't.
And all three (Good, Vinge, Kurzweil) views of the Singularity are different.
This stuff is old: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools/ It's amazing that people want to lump in anyone associated with it, or just related moral ideas like "death really sucks, what's a general way to end it?" as cranks of the same sort. Or worse compare it to a religion (http://archive.fo/6oI0u)
Yudkowsky is another self-promoting hype machine, in the vein of Kurzweil. I wouldn't take him as the most unbiased source on the history of the singularity idea or how "his" ideas differ from the rest.
