That is why I am very septic about predictions of the future, even if some become true alone, it is quite impossible to grasp how a future society might look as a whole.
We had a futurist from Intel visit our small startup about two years ago for a future planning/predicting exercise. I think we were not the correct audience for these exercises though, due to the small size of our company.
What I learned from the exercise was that companies as large and influential as Intel don't have to follow market trends or predict "how things will be" because they are not subjects of some natural market--they _define_ the market.
It seemed crazy to me to have exercises planning 20+ years into the future, but Intel necessarily has to do this due to the size of the ship they're piloting.
Bill Gates' stated Vision decades ago was "a computer on every desktop" and he helped (led?) us there to the point where we now take it for granted. The sheer audaciousness of the original Vision is amazing considering the cost, size, etc of what computers were then. Whatever the (often valid) criticism is today, they helped define and expand our industry in a way that shouldn't be overlooked.
Not many companies hope to do that, let alone accomplish it.
Missing the boat on the importance of Google and the iPhone, now those were huuuuge mistakes. Was Gates still running the show then?
And.. win95 plus (or was it 98?) had an html/javascript based active desktop that is conceptually similar to current web paradigms and UX.
The world DNA evolves weirdly.
Also, Microsoft tried to train everyone about the concept of hyperlinks - Explorer in Win98 used to open files with a single click (and it was highlighted and underlines like hyperlinks too). Too bad the concept didn't catch on.
And in the book The Road Ahead, I recall Bill Gates describing something like Google Docs/Office Online too.
Shame that in their clinginess to IP made them unpopular.
Actually, I don't even think we would be talking about global warming if it wasen't for Al Gore. I didn't like the man when I was younger for horrid reasons; like I thought he was a spoiled, rich politician who really didn't care, and was using these topics to gain political points.
I was completely wrong! I wish he would run for office again. I know I would give him a vote.
When Al Gore hit my radar, I thought he was completely irrelevant. In retrospect, I'm sure that's not true because some of the legislation that he pushed through paved the way for commercial traffic. But believe me, it was coming whether he did anything or not.
He may have accelerated the process slightly, but probably not too much. His major contribution may actually have been to maintain US dominance of the internet for a couple more decades. Canada was already gearing up for it and I remember friends setting up fledgling ISPs in about 1993 (right when CANARIE had finished being set up).
Personally, I don't have any real thoughts about Al Gore one way or another. I can see he was very influential, but from my perspective he was mostly just riding the wave as opposed to creating it.
This article explains it succinctly: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/16/intel-chips-could-...
Intel CEO Paul Otellini on the iPhone negotiations: "At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
Additionally, predictions of the future often lean either toward optimistic or pessimistic, rather than in between. But this is more complicated than it seems because a big part of the underlying mechanism is comfort. People make optimistic predictions that seem comfortable to them, and they make pessimistic predictions based on what seems uncomfortable. But comfort is not immutable, it changes depending on familiarity. The internet is uncomfortable to some and comfortable to others, as was the automobile and the telephone. When trains and automobiles first came about they were scary to a lot of people, partly for legitimate reasons and partly for not. Eventually most people became comfortable with such things.
But even so, there's no new technology that doesn't come with down-sides, and it can often be difficult to imagine people of the future accepting new kinds of problems, sometimes even very severe problems. Nothing is perfect though, and people often have a blind spot for the problems of the things they are currently familiar and comfortable with and they don't see how getting rid of those problems makes the new problems more than worth the trade. Imagining multiple cycles of trade-offs and trade-ups from technology to technology is a very difficult thing to do.
And too, as you say, the impact of technology on society and then society on technology is even more difficult to grasp. This goes along with pg's essay about "what you can't say". If you can't say such things now you certainly can't talk about them in the context of the future.