Chris used to say that we had the tools and technologies to prevent the period of severe austerity that's comming, but we lacked the collective will power to get them into place in time. He's more recently updated his stance that it's now too late, and we are in for austerity no matter what (it's gone from "problem" to "predicament"). But he has never said that period of austerity would last forever, or that those technologies that won't come online in time won't ever come online.
I would be very curious to know Chris' thoughts/speculations about a longer timeline of, say, 50 years.
Is it likely that, during that period, we might get a safe, abundant energy source up and running on a large scale? Thorium? Fusion? Advances in solar/renewable/battery technology?
Remember that in a previous ~50-year period in history we created a national power grid, learned how to fly, went to the moon, created antibiotics, added decades to the average human life span, split the atom… does it seem so far-fetched that in the next 50 we'll work the last few kinks out of an abundant, clean energy source? The Chinese expect to have a thorium plant up and running by 2020, and many other countries have started their own thorium programs to keep pace.
There are a lot of problems that can be solved by abundant, clean energy, and a lot of predicaments that can be softened. Take resource depletion as one example: In a cubic mile of ocean water there is over $10,000 worth of gold, and 600,000,000 lbs of bromine, a substance used in the production of anti-knock gasoline. We already have plants that gather bromine from ocean water economically. The biggest difficulty in this process? The cost of pumping; i.e. the cost of energy. Imagine what we could do with abundant, clean, virtually free energy with technology like this? And it's speculated that, even without a source of free energy, plants like this will start collecting a host of other critical minerals from the sea within a decade. So, a lot of these resources that are considered "lost" may not actually be lost at all in a world with abundant clean energy, which might just be our world sometime in the next 50 years.
And in fairness to Kurzweil, he never said that recessions don't happen, or relatively brief periods of slower technological development. He just pointed out that, on a large graph of exponential technological progress throughout centuries of human history, those periods of time are hardly visible in the overal trend.