Skyscrapers were around at the end of the 19th century, we haven't reached 200 livable floors yet (as one of the commenters on that article said), and you certainly don't see "air-ships and carriages fastened to balloons for the transportation of the people through the air, and you will often see collisions in the clouds."
It just seems like a linear prediction based on what was seen during that era.
Try making a linear prediction for 2100 and see how hard it is.
"we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)" - http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
The 20th century will be hard to beat. For one thing, we'll need to find new resources to exploit.
instead
make use of resources we already have found, but remain unused for the most part (solar etc).
You can't just map the whole world onto a linear scale and expect resulting metrics to be consistent.
Meat brains aren't subject to the law (yet). We don't change ourselves so we don't get a growing return on our own improvements.
I ought to have the same skill at predictions (environment, nutrition, education, age, culture, upbringing, effort, normal human variations in ability and the quirk of ever increasing IQ levels notwithstanding).
Computers are, obviously, better - more transistors in CPUs, much more cache, much bigger harddrives, cheaper memory.
Digital cameras are way better, not only higher megapixel sensors and larger, cheaper storage cards, larger LCDs but also more realtime processing than before with face-detection, Sony's smile-detection, and they're around the same price.
Broadband in the UK has gone from being a new choice for the leading edge, to being commonplace, to flattening out the choices so 8Mb is the standard, to ADSL2+ being available at the larger exchanges outside London.
Popular screen technology for computers and TVs has almost entirely switched to LCDs when it was CRTs for everybody 10 years ago.
The first iPod I bought was a 3rd generation 40Gb model. It would have been in 2003 or so, now I have one that's cheaper, lighter, smaller, faster, nicer screen, longer battery life, which is also a video player, phone, emailer and has 3d acceleration hardware.
What about the new Macbook's unibody construction? They couldn't mill cases out of solid aluminium in large quantities without CNC machines. They have been around for years, but presumably it's only a small number of years that it's been precise/cheap/available enough for Apple to use it profitably. I took a few laptops apart around 2000, there were lots of parts, widely spread out. Check the disassembly of the new Macbook - the mainboard is tiny. It's almost certainly largely built by very precise robots and designed with the help of a lot of computing power.
USB has gone from being a bit of a joke (in 2000 I had a USB Zip 100 drive) to being the file transfer and peripheral connection medium of choice with multi-Gb sticks for sale anywhere and everywhere.
Could you have bought a roomba in 2000 to sweep your floors for you? Or a friendly robotics Robomow? Or a games console with built in, low hassle, online ability? Or a BluRay player and a HD TV?
OK, my life as a day-to-day event is different because I work with and on computers using the internet, and that's where I can see the changes, but on a day to day basis it's much the same, the same sort of transport, food, books, consumables, etc.
Although I could now (had I the money) buy a car which would pre-arm the brakes if I was too close to the car in front so they will apply quicker, parallel park for me, alert me if there's someone in the blind spots, silence the carphone incoming calls when cornering hard as it would be too distracting to ring then. None of these things were around 10 years ago.
Nothing seems much different, but then most of my life is spent wearing woven thread, sitting on wood or plasticfoamy chairs, eating plants and being around brick buildings. At that level, how much change do you expect?
Things are the-same-but-better now. HDs are bigger, broadband is, err, broader, screens have more pixels. There have been no major shifts of the magnitude of "the web being invented". You could have linearly projected 2008 from 2000, I reckon, even in the tech sector which is the fastest moving of all. It would have been much harder to forecast 1998 from 1990.
People in general might do the same things, but that's not because the hardware can only do the same things.
Things like air-ships fastened to balloons you have to translate to their modern equivalent -- for example in NY you can take a helicopter shuttle to the airport (to avoid being stuck in horrible traffic).