This is mostly a rant aimed at dramatic presentations. TV and film are just gross offenders; books less so, if you're looking in the right places.
As much as I like a lot of sci-fi movies, when it comes to portraying the future, they're just lamentably wide of the mark. Maybe that's fine if you're not looking for something prophetic. If all you're after is taking one tech aspect of today, advancing it in a bubble void for umpteen years and then tacking it onto present day society, then a lot of movies fit the bill.
Hell, if you argue that what you want is just a way of presenting today's issues in a different context, then you're in luck. There's plenty of that. But a way of envisaging what tomorrow will be like? Not so much.
I'm a fan of Aliens. Hell, who isn't, right? And you've got some tasty tech, some fine roughed-up starships, some interesting biological critters from another world. But realism? No. That's an 80s movie with 80s people (if that) transported to a distant galaxy.
The same applies to Prometheus, from this year. Take people from today, sprinkle a little tech that's isolated from everything else and juice it up and sprinkle on top.
And so forth for the majority of shows that try to look more than a decade or so into the future, and for three main reasons.
First, movies and TV shows tend to only look at isolated bits of tech. Hey, let's add in some cool advanced guns. Or spaceships. What they skip is the integration of multiple lines of tech. Everything from comms to health to data and processing. But especially the convergence of the big three: AI, genetics and nanotech. You plot out the developments in these areas and where they are going and you don't just have a future consisting of Joe Blow from today holding Cool Gadget #3 in his hands. Joe Blow is radically different. His interactions are radically different.
Two, the timelines for most of their tech is woefully conservative, for the fact that people find it hard to grasp that progress is not linear, but exponential. Plotting out cool gadgetry a hundred years in the future is almost laughable when you start applying curves to progress.
And finally, related to the second, there's almost this sense that people live in a fairly technologically stable universe. They'll show you a person from the future and things for this character are pretty much the same for them as when they were younger. No, they won't be. It's not like it's the 1800s and the world of the parents is the same as the world of the children. The world of people growing up in the 2020s is going to be radically different from the world of those growing up in the 2050s. Progress is not stopping, and it's not slowing down.
If you've got a movie that's a hundred years in the future and there are lumps of meat walking around surrounded by dumb matter, then without a lot of explaining I'm just going to be enjoying it as a fun fantasy piece. Because that's not even trying to be a realistic window to our future.
