Growing up in the 70s, video phones were like flying cars and jet packs. Things right around the corner but never to arrive over the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Could be seen on The Jetsons, represent progress, a progress we saw clearly on TV, a recent invention itself.

And now, unlike flying cars and jetpacks, video phones have arrived. Not with a bang but with a whimper - no one actually looks forward to a video call, I'd guess.

And flying cars and jetpacks? They're not impossible, just absurdly dangerous and less likely because of this.

And video phones are similarly not actually desirable, just less extreme. Between 70s and the 2000s, I think most people figured out that video phones didn't exist 'cause unlike TV, they would be weird and awkward and unpleasant.

The big thing is that, very roughly, ~1850~1950 saw an incredible transformation of the infrastructure of daily life. The gas/electric stove, the gas/electric light bulb, the train and the automobile and beyond saw an incredible transformation of the physical environment in which people lived. After this period, technology has continued but the modernized items are improvements rather than fundamental innovations (with the exception of the Internet, which didn't change physical space).

It seems like the "science fiction world" of Robert Heinlein and others was very much a linear extrapolation of this earlier period of changing physical infrastructure - from sea ports to star port. Now, it's more obvious that if the physical structure of daily life changes, it's going to be following a different curve and transforming different things. The Internet, for example, was a vast change but it augmented, not supplanted, earlier tech.

Here, I think the main thing that hasn't caught up are certain kinds of imagination. The proponents of "Fermi's paradox" still imagines every intelligent species will "reach for the stars" despite the lack of evidence of any having done so.

But still it's interesting to consider.