Well, flying cars have about eight years to get here...
But really... technological progress since about 1985 hasn't quite gone the way people thought. Is it ever like that? What happens is that leaps forward occur in the strangest places. We don't have thinking robots or hover conversion, but we DO have the Internet. Almost no one predicted that. Our cars don't drive themselves, but some of them can help us get our bearings. The whole computerized home thing still hasn't taken off yet; we still use the same PCs we had back then--just more refined.
I myself am looking forward to HVD--the holographic versatile disc. It's the next step up from Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, storing data in three dimensions, putting potential storage capacity into the multiple terabyte range. I'm waiting for the time I can put everything on my computer onto one disc... hopefully that'll be it.
Futurama... is a 21st century look at the 31st century. That's what it has to be; if it were a real look one thousand years into the future, it would be unrecognizable.
Think of what life was like 1000 years ago in... England, for example. Pre-Norman conquest, pre-Colombian, pre-Reformation, you'd have a better chance of understanding what was then English if you knew Norse. You'd get your head chopped off at the drop of a hat, your spiritual life was controlled by one institution for the entire western continent, and if you didn't have the strength to farm you were dead. If you asked Aedberht of York what you've asked here... I don't think he'd be able to predict the changes that have taken place since then. How can we do it now?
