Reading old science fiction is entertainment of the grandest sort, the kind that lets you feel smugly superior. "Hahaha, author," you get to jeer, "if only you'd known you'd be wrong in every way."
Space travel, flying cars, effective world governments... all par for the course by 2000, if some sci-fi were to be believed.
Looking back, one clear trend in the last few decades is that technology's been completely driven by the market economy. Sure, space travel might have taken off if governments had kept funding it, but there's just not much economic incentive to leave the planet right now. Given the US government's looming budgetary crises and eagerness to pander to voters, I think it's safe to say this trend will continue.
Another trend is that while completely unprecedented things do show up from time to time (eg, the Internet), it's much more common to see incremental improvements on existing technologies. So we don't have flying cars, but we do have much more efficient, stylish, and refined road cars using a variety of propulsion techniques.
If we extrapolate along these lines, what could we predict about 2025? Hmm...
We'll have UHDTV that can fill an entire wall with high-res video for reasonable prices, but no mass-market contact lenses that can overlay video onto your field of view.
The US will finally have broken free of its dependence on fossil fuels, but most of us will still be driving relatively inefficient cars on old-fashioned road networks (instead of mass transit).
We'll have multi-petabyte hard disks (or similar capacity from some competing technology), enough to store every word ever written thousands of times over, but people will still lose data because they haven't made any backups.
Cell phones will be ridiculously fast, small, easy-to-use, and cheap, but mega-corporations will still control the spectrum and there will be no cheap/free, open, high-bandwidth mesh network.
Video game graphics will be ridiculously realistic and AAA titles will be produced by studios 3 times as big as today's biggest, but we still won't see much procedural content generation and advances in AI will be pathetic.
Most homes will have multi-terabit Internet connections that can download 12 DVD's per second with ease, but they'll still go down entirely every time some moron with a backhoe doesn't call Miss Utility.
I hope I'm wrong about most of these.
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