In today's Wall Street Journal Lee Gomes takes Ray Kurzweil to task for the narrow range of thinkers and doers who blurbed his new book, The Singularity Is Near. (Online subscription required by the Journal.)

Rather than dig deeply into some of the ideas behind the book, as Fast Company contributor did in our March issue -- and in an extended transcript online -- Gomes instead plays a version of old-school blurb buddies to suggest that the people endorsing Kurzweil's work need further endorsement themselves.

"My modest proposal is for the whole Kurzweil-Minksy-Joy lot to be locked up somewhere -- under humane conditions, of course, with plenty of sunlight and good Internet access -- and forced to actually build the computers that they keep insisting are just around the corner," Gomes writes. "Until that happens, no more books or articles or hectoring."

What think you? Is futurism passe?