Scientists and engineers have an abysmal track record of predicting the future.
You know to be concerned when a claim is dismissed with ‘that’s just science fiction, it will never happen’
Broken clock... They are good at exploring possibilities, but none of the famous one predicted today.
Mind you, no one is able to predict the future with accuracy. I am not saying that a single person has gotten all their prediction right. That's ludicrous. But while scientists and engineers are focused on today's possibilities, the ones that are allowed to imagine what the future might look like are called writers.
Despite certain people's protestations to the contrary, we are nowhere near having a human-level conversational computer assistant able to fuzzily interpret our requests correctly every time...but our computing is also not primarily done on "comconsoles" or any of the other versions of stationary computers, nor are we jabbing and swiping our hands at interfaces projected on the air in front of us.
More generally speaking, except in the hardest of hard sci-fi, the most common kinds of advancement "predicted" are those that are convenient for the story. This means a lot of faster-than-light travel, universal translators, and for visual media many voice-enabled interfaces of one sort or another, as well as the aforementioned holographic interfaces (so we can see the user's face and the interface at the same time).
The author is quite vague about it, no doubt, and that's one of his staples. But he foresaw something human would carry to get connected to other humans and information.
(That book won the Hugo award in 1990)