It's occurred to me recently that all the whiz-bang gadgets predicted either already exist in some form, or are unlikely to exist anytime soon. If one were to write a technology-centric non-dystopian novel about, say, the year 2040, what neato things would we imagine?
I can't come up with much.
Actually, that's an excellent question. I remember reading Kim Stanley Robinson's wonderful Mars Trilogy back in the early 90's, and enjoying its speculations, including a distant future in which people could access their own personal databases of information via a wireless wrist computer. This was a couple of years before the advent of, um...Hotbot? Webcrawler? Anyway, ten years was all it took for this to seem horribly dated. (A bit reminiscent of the Stanislaw Lem novel--Fiasco, maybe?--in which explorers to another planet are recording moving images using an enormous film camera.)
I can't come up with anything, either, aside from time travel, the last great conceptual frontier. Suddenly I'm terrified that science fiction is dead. Steve Jobs killed it. Horrors!
