I was skeptic at first too. Read the first few dozen pages of The Singularity Is Near and you'll be impressed the quality of the data. By almost all accounts, technological progress datapoints match very closely an exponential curve.

Here's a good mashup from a number of third party sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events....

This is hardly a wishy washy thesis by a history major. The data are pretty robust.