In the spirit of all that "Where is my Robot?" guff, I was thinking about what it actually meant to be in 2010 - a full ten years beyond all those Blue-Peter boundaries when we discovered that the future of 2000 was not actually very different from the time when we all first thought about it. It is of course because, like the way people we know and meet everyday do not seem to age, we are blind to the slow changes. While we don't have hover cars and personal robots, we do have technology that would have seemed far-further-fetched had someone mentioned it in the 60s. The cars we do have, have computers to maximise fuel economy, radios which search for travel news, and all sorts of little bits and pieces to make them work better and feel better to the passengers. Most houses have access to digital information at rates of transfer that still cannot be comprehended. Just as the distances that separate stars are so far that we don't have the apparatus to think about them, the amount of information which squirts between all those little black boxes every day is outside our ability to reference it with real-world terms. Even if you shrink the time period down to bring the data volumes to a recognisable figure, the time taken is now just too small for your brain to handle.
The future is just the present having caught up with you.
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