Giving a demo of something that is not yet possible (but will be) is different from giving a demo of a commercial product. The goal for a “future demo” is to get people thinking about what might be possible not now, but sometime in the coming years.
The Mother of all Demos by Doug Engelbart in 1968 was a perfect example of this. He wasn’t saying “you can have this now.” He was saying “if we work very hard, one day we will all have this.”
And he was right.
I think that one of my responsibilities as a researcher is to give a such demo every once in a while, in the spirit of Engelbart. The goal of these demos is not to announce that the future has arrived, but rather to gently steer it in the right direction.