We didn't get flying cars at $250,000/car. We got 140 characters for free because that's what people wanted. We didn't get hoverboards, not for lack of technology, but it just turned out that we wanted to search the world's knowledge with Google.
We're frogs in boiling water, not knowing just how innovative we're becoming as a people. And sci-fi writers are just bad (or as bad as typical entrepreneurs) at guessing what people want.
Well, good sci-fi writers don't try. As Ursula Le Guin puts it,
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually
charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by
futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and
futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
We didn't get flying cars at $250,000/car. We got 140 characters for free because that's what people wanted. We didn't get hoverboards, not for lack of technology, but it just turned out that we wanted to search the world's knowledge with Google.
We're frogs in boiling water, not knowing just how innovative we're becoming as a people. And sci-fi writers are just bad (or as bad as typical entrepreneurs) at guessing what people want.