MISCELLANEOUS: Technological progress exponential ?

Technological progress is accelerating, this is the credo of futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil.















I have always been quite sceptical about this statement, for various reasons, some of them being:

• Resources are limited and any growth will settle once a system approaches these limits.
• Some things grow exponentially (e.g. computer power, number of sequenced nucleotides), others don't (e.g. number of proteins being structurally analyzed). So this growth behaviour were less a general law than a data selection effect.
• Technological growth rates might be correlated with the population growth rates which are also exponential and which can't hold forever (same reson as in 1).
• Growth is strongly due to availability of oil. After we have reached (world) "peak oil" things might change.
  

However the following video is quite impressive and lets me rethink the whole issue:
Innovation Everywhere—How the Acceleration of “GNR” (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics) Will Create a Flat and Equitable World