Maybe I have a weak imagination, but Star Trek and other sci-fi have probably done anything that can be done with any kind of technology we can come up with. Beyond sci-fi is fantasy land, and sci-fi as a genre has reached that border, beyond that its where Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings take over.
+1 technology has advanced much since then, but nothing spectacular enough to change SF. What we have is basically faster and smaller computers, and network effects due to global connectivity.
There's nothing really new in travel methods (nope, still no flying cars), cities are the same, VR never took off, human-level AI is still far away, we're still fighting for resources (with bullets) and space programs are being dismantled as we speak.
So it makes sense that our current sci-fi is still the same as that of the 80-90's.
We have plenty of flying things that ordinary people can afford. Ultralights, powered paragliders, some cheap helicopters, etc. The legal reality of flying things means that they'll never be useful for mass transportation: if you thought drunk driving was bad, wait'll you see drunk flying. Do you want some dumbass crashing into your roof in the middle of the night? Or hell, crashing into you, when you're both 300 feet in the air? Fact is, we've got a nation full of people who can't handle the responsibility of living next to a McDonald's, flight is like a joke.
I think you're a little restrictive on scifi by referencing only television. There's a lot of very new scifi published as books - television has maybe dropped away, but read something by Charles Stross, for example. I don't think that such stories would have been popular or feasible in the late 80s. Television as a whole has become much less suited to fantastic ideas or new concepts as a reflection of modern tastes - look at the lack of very good documentaries compared to the late 60s and early 70s, for example, and the proliferation of reality TV shows.
A lot of the tech that we have is invisible to you; it's too commonplace to be called wondrous. You casually dismiss commoditized computing resources and global connectivity...the cultural and societal developments arising from these were not expected 20 years ago.
We do have flying cars, I think. They're called helicopters and are too dangerous to allow everyone to have one and drive wherever they like. They cost about the same as a high-end sports car. Like a high-end sports car, most of us won't own one, you can't just park them on the street and they cost up to about $500k.
We have changed cities hugely! You can buy any food anywhere at anytime regardless of season due to improvements in transport and agriculture technology. Cities are a huge mixture of cultures and nationalities in a way they weren't 20 years ago due to improved communications technology. Public transport is much more reliable - if you want to go somewhere, go to the city website and type in the address; you'll be given a routemap that you can carry on your internet-enabled phone, and in many cities you can track the bus in real time. Use that phone to check where your friends are and meet up spontaneously without worrying about a place's quality, because you checked out a hundred reviews on a location-aware website. How many people could work from coffee shops 20 years ago? Buildings are safer (and smaller), and feature built-in hooks for modern tech to play with. It's not happening fast - but look at how cities 'advanced' in the previous 500 years. You have to temper your expectations, a little.
You say that human-level AI is far away - I say that Google can organise and index things better than I could. Mathematical theorems are solved automatically and markets are balanced by intelligences that operate on the nanosecond and picosecond time scales! It's true that a computer won't chat to you, but wouldn't you prefer to talk to a person? VR is similar - it's a societal disinclination, rather than a technological problem. (You can already make a case that augmented reality is here right now.)
Space programmes are being dismantled, and new ones are being put into place. I think that space exploration is healthier now than it was in the 90s. Private companies are finally looking like being able to launch spacecraft reliably. SpaceX's Dragon module is the most exciting thing to happen since before the Hubble telescope.
All these things are referenced and extrapolated in good, modern scifi - just not on the dying medium that is television. Be more optimistic! :-D
(Aside: Can one can make a case that the most popular form of scifi on TV right now is crime drama? Fancy hand-held analyzers map DNA structure and imaging technologies can reconstruct crime scenes from grainy pictures. Network traces track fugitives and the machines seem to finger the perp. automagically - this is not the case in the real world...)
I agree that a lot has changed since the 80's and most of it is commonplace and 'invisible'. The world has changed a lot, and is about to change even more.
But indeed, the TV format can't really show that effectively. And hey, helicopters already existed in the 80's :-)
Ten years from now, robotics, AI, and silicon get good enough that we have a massive robotic revolution, mirroring the Industrial Revolution. Robotics takes the labor out of virtually all production, making capitalism obsolete.
The productivity of Capitalism is replaced with creativity. With our World awash in "stuff" too cheap to matter, corporations shrink and disappear, replaced with small groups mirroring today's open source communities.
That's just off the top of my head. Today's TV and movie sci-fi are far from challenging the limits of anything.
And yeah, this is from a guy with the handle of Capitalist.
Judging from today state of the art AI - creativity would be automated much earlier than dumb physical jobs.
We already have pattern matching and theorem proving software, I think that throwing sheer computing power at hard problem where strict criteria for correctnes are defined would be cheaper than human problem solver.
On the other hand mechanical and interfacing side of robot revolution seems to lag after AI research. Teaching robot to run is hard problem, brain has many layers of hardware for doing this, and it's easier to make new human, than it is to make new robot.
All in all I predict the exact opposite - unskilled workers will have jobs, creativity in many cases would be automated.
Our imagination expands as our possibilities become greater.
Also, there is the 3rd Clarke's law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
Sci-fi can easily get into the realm of fantasy (I've already seen a scientifically explained napalm-breathing dragons in 21st century Earth on TV) and vice versa (I've read a story about designing and building spaceships by stacking many layers of different magic onto a wooden ark).
The really interesting thing that sci-fi can give us is this: assume that in described world, a selected type of "magic" is possible (handwaving it into a scientificly-sound concept for the sake of the reading experience) and extrapolate the consequences. What can be done with it, and - more important - how will people behave, how will it transform the society.
Orson Scott Card did something like this with the Internet in "Ender's Game".
>> assume that in described world, a selected type of "magic" is possible (handwaving it into a scientificly-sound concept for the sake of the reading experience) and extrapolate the consequences. What can be done with it, and - more important - how will people behave, how will it transform the society.
That's my definition of good science fiction. Asimov was the master, but I can't find many others like him. I liked OSC too. Do you have any recommendations?
I liked Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon a Deep". This book is a goldmine of interesting concepts about alien species and their civilisations, completely different from "standard TV aliens". Also "The Trigger" by Arthur C. Clarke - it's a book about how an accidental discovery causes technological change, which transforms life of societies around the world. One of the best books I've ever read.
Maybe I have a weak imagination, but Star Trek and other sci-fi have probably done anything that can be done with any kind of technology we can come up with. Beyond sci-fi is fantasy land, and sci-fi as a genre has reached that border, beyond that its where Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings take over.