When trying to predict the future, it could be useful to look at past attempts. The game of asking “hey, this is what the technologically enabled future will look like,” is an old and venerable one.
It might be useful to look at which visions of the future turned out to have a good correlation with the eventual reality. Some have done a good job weathering the test of time, and others not so much.
What are the qualities that successful predictions of the future have in common? Can we find any patterns of commonality?
For example, is there some intrinsic quality about Captain Kirk’s communicator that made it such an uncannily good predictor of talking over the SmartPhone? I wonder whether anyone has seriously studied this question.
Maybe they should.