Though it's always fun to read/watch such predictions, chaos theory suggests we have absolutely no clue as to what the future will look like.
The black swan is a nice book explaining why predictions generally fail.
When I was a middle schooler in the 90s my grandpa would bring over stacks of old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s-70s that were predicting what life would be like in future decades.
I think it gave me a good perspective when reading these same kinds of predictions made today. For the most part, they complely missed on the existence, much less the impact, on things like social media.
It was easy to predict the physical nature of small, hand-held computing devices, but their actual impact on how society functions was missed.
Even watching "realistic" contemporary sc-fi like The Expanse, they focus on the physical aspect of how realistic space colonization would work with slow space travel, but completely ignore the role of AI and drones. Will we even need real people to live on an asteroid city, even if Mars is colonized?
"...The way our statistical analysis works, the farther into the future you go, the more accurate the projection. It's based on a kind of non-linear dynamics, whereby small fluctuations tend to factor out over time." - Julien Bashir
I think it gave me a good perspective when reading these same kinds of predictions made today. For the most part, they complely missed on the existence, much less the impact, on things like social media.
It was easy to predict the physical nature of small, hand-held computing devices, but their actual impact on how society functions was missed.
Even watching "realistic" contemporary sc-fi like The Expanse, they focus on the physical aspect of how realistic space colonization would work with slow space travel, but completely ignore the role of AI and drones. Will we even need real people to live on an asteroid city, even if Mars is colonized?