One piece that I find interesting is how hopeful people sounded about tech that had access to your data. Folks higher up in the tech world often complain about how the media complains about them too much. And while the media definitely has issues in how they report, it's easier to see how we got to this point where tech is vilified. You compare the hope of the past and match it to the exploitation of the present, and you can't help but feel sometimes that in a game of picking straws, the current timeline picked dystopian over utopian.

> she is able to stroll through immigration without stopping because her P-Comm is dealing with the ID checks as she walks.

We're getting closer to digital ID. But outside of a few experiments, there's no international consensus. However, every modern passport has an NFC chip which can be read by most airports. You still need to hold your passport on the reader, but it's usually quicker than queuing for a human.

As far as immigration to the US is concerned (and I guess it is, because I haven't heard of the term "immigration" applied to business travelers or tourists anywhere else in the world), expecting to be able to "stroll through" it sounds increasingly naive after reports of various unsuspecting travelers being detained for weeks and then deported (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...), and the current to-and-fro around TSA PreCheck and Global Entry (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/22/politics/shutdonw-tsa-pre...).

For a similar fun set of reviews of past predictions of future tech, I recommend looking through Youtube channel "KnowledgeHusk"

Selected videos:

"People in the 80s Making Fun of Predictions From the 60s" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-B6zeAKAEQ

"2002 Tried To Predict 2025" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMZ9odjhOnU

"Terrible Predictions About The Future From 2005" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9kf9KLVVQ

(and many more can be found in their Retrofuturism playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZkkImzuw5q9Kk5KIq1yw... )

This was really fun - it's interesting how many of the scenarios involve public internet terminals. I can see how at the turn of the millennium it would have sounded absurd that we'd be able to hold in our hand a mobile terminal that would allow any serious business to be accomplished, what with text entry being painfully slow, mobile screens being low-resolution, and mobile data being incredibly slow and just rolling out in most places. Indeed, "logging on" from someone else's computer out of necessity was quite common, even in the mid 00s. Of course, the login processes of some websites are still operating on the same assumptions. Gotta love the whole "Keep me logged in? Don't check this on public or shared devices." Like I'm doing my banking at an Internet cafe or something.

It's interesting to see, a happy, albeit a naive hope for the future. Things we wished for maybe, but in some cases what we have now is the monkey paw version; automatic synchronization of everything with personal data is in reality a privacy nightmare full of sensitive data that's about to leak or already has been used against you by the advertisers.

Reducing mental load and reliance on other people or more primitive technology also skips losing interpersonal relationships, making us more susceptible for even more technological dependence...

This is quite fun. I've always enjoyed looking at past predictions of the future. This one seemed quite spot on most of the time as well which is quite interesting. In 2010 it might have looked a bit off, but as the author notes now with LLMs a lot more of these predictions have come true.

And yeah, it's always fun seeing the ones that don't come true, ie the connected fridge that orders food for you, and not for lack of trying.

The "agent" stuff was a fascinating vision. It seems like an alternate history more than a future, as I'm sure if we all let our claws talk amongst themselves they won't be finding ways to collectively help us -- they'll probably be scamming crypto from each other or something.

That work like this often predicts a good portion of the technological advancements, but usually completely misses the mark on the execution and the enshittified commodification is why I like reading cyberpunk and other dystopian sci-fi.

With current AI computers are finally starting to do what people in the 1980s thought computers would be doing in 2000.