Our understanding of thermodynamics is very thorough. Our understanding allows us to make a plethora of predictions, all of which are falsifiable, and have been throughly tested over the years.
This is what makes our theories about thermodynamics real scientific theories.
Predictions about the future, no matter how simple or based on long running past trends, are only falsifiable in exactly one way: wait until the predicted date passes.
I think a very, very informal use of the term "law" could cover both. But what irks me as a science minded person, is that Kurzweil is attempting to equate the informal meaning of "law", generic description of a phenomenon, with the scientific "law", an actual testable, falsifiable theory with predictive powers.
No, Kurzweil was not equating the "Law of Accelerating Returns" to a physical law of the universe. Instead, he was comparing it, albeit clumsily, to laws that govern aggregate behavior, like the second law of thermodynamics. There are lot of things that we colloquially call "laws" that clearly don't have the same footing as laws in physics, "Moore's Law" being one of them.
This is what makes our theories about thermodynamics real scientific theories.
Predictions about the future, no matter how simple or based on long running past trends, are only falsifiable in exactly one way: wait until the predicted date passes.
I think a very, very informal use of the term "law" could cover both. But what irks me as a science minded person, is that Kurzweil is attempting to equate the informal meaning of "law", generic description of a phenomenon, with the scientific "law", an actual testable, falsifiable theory with predictive powers.