people love to extrapolate continuously into the far future based on the past 3-5 years and it's led to silly ideas like soylent green-style overpopulation, mars colonies in the year 2000, and machine learning leading to actual intelligence
It’s fun to say how sci-fi didn’t predict a thing but good sci-fi isn’t written as a prediction. The people that try to predict things are called futurists and they’re all idiots that get it even more wrong than the sci-fi
There’s one futurist that got it right, and that’s the one that predicted the internet will become so completely full of noise, so completely hostile to civilization, that a decentralized network of concerned citizens will target key internet infrastructure and take down the primary nodes within the US, rendering us without a functioning internet, which in turn leads to a collapse of the US financial system, as other countries replace the arpanet-descended internet with their own localized systems, sending the US into a domestic apocalypse scenario while the rest of the world rebuilds—