What gets made is what people want.

We didn't get flying cars at $250,000/car. We got 140 characters for free because that's what people wanted. We didn't get hoverboards, not for lack of technology, but it just turned out that we wanted to search the world's knowledge with Google.

We're frogs in boiling water, not knowing just how innovative we're becoming as a people. And sci-fi writers are just bad (or as bad as typical entrepreneurs) at guessing what people want.