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 :-)
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...)