It's interesting how social and human issues overrule technology in most cases though. Predicting what technology will be possible seems to be a lot easier than predicting what people will actually want to use.
With regards to "communications will become sight-sound", this has been theoretically possible for nearly all communications for a while now, yet broadly speaking people choose not to be on video despite it being possible. The same goes for 3D TV, as noted in the article, or the renaissance of proper cooking as opposed to chucking semi-artificial muck into the microwave for 5 minutes as was considered 'the future' in the late 70s.
Not only do we not always use video, we seem to prefer even lower fidelity communications.
Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.
> It's interesting how social and human issues overrule technology in most cases though.
Exactly, the same is painfully true for our presence in space. He could have easily been right about the moon base, we just chose to not "do" space.
The big takeaway from this for me is that it's possible for a tech-minded person to make good predictions about the speed of technological advancement in general, it just gets thwarted by the uncertainty of society's interest in these things.
I think this is why sci-fi authors seem to predict future better than futurists - to write good science fiction you need not only to have imagination and know the science well, but you also need to grok people and society, if you want your book to be believable for audience.
The killer app for video calling, would be one in which you don't have to hold the camera. We'd rather place the phone to our ear. And the current alternative is probably nostril cam. We each need a Lakitu.
I don't want someone to see me unless there is a reason. All of a sudden I have to worry about whether I look like I'm paying attention (I'm probably not), what I look like (I'll take a phone call in my Pjs, I wouldn't take a video call), whether I'm doing something that looks unappealing and so on.
Video offers additional benefits but they come with a "price". For me personally it seems as if that given that price you've got to be in a position where the benefit is worth it.
When reviewing assorted long-term predictions, I've notice the primary issue with failed predictions isn't so much that we can't do X, but that we don't want to.
50-100 years ago, the big favorite was variations of living in space/Moon/Mars/etc. Yes, we could certainly do that. What the pundits failed to take into account was that for all the hard work involved in settling there, it's...boring. Yeah, the trip there is exciting ('cuz it's fast, violent, and failure would be spectacular), and being "the first" (or among such) would be a social thrill, but once there mere survival would be paramount & dominating with little time to explore stagnant rocks.
Likewise other predictions. Yeah, we can do them, but given a matter of diminishing returns on high costs we'd rather stare at pocket supercomputers with instant worldwide high-bandwidth communications.
With regards to "communications will become sight-sound", this has been theoretically possible for nearly all communications for a while now, yet broadly speaking people choose not to be on video despite it being possible. The same goes for 3D TV, as noted in the article, or the renaissance of proper cooking as opposed to chucking semi-artificial muck into the microwave for 5 minutes as was considered 'the future' in the late 70s.