If you really want your mind blown look at how accurate Ray Kurzweil was from his 1999 book Age of Spiritual Machines

The most striking thing is that almost all of his missed predictions were missed not because the technology was not available, but because society rejected or didn’t adopt that technology

> but because society rejected or didn’t adopt that technology

OK, so imagine that in 1980, I predicted that we'll colonize Mars by the year 2020. Today, I'm arguing that I was right in my prediction - in broad strokes, we have the technology! Nothing is stopping us. It's just that politicians have different priorities.

Of course, that's a load of bull. You can't decouple predictions about the future of mankind from what said mankind actually decides.

I looked up the predictions on Wikipedia and I'd say that most of them are general enough that they'd hard to disagree with back in 1999 (there will be bioengineering, there will be portable computers, there will be robots, there will be AI), but the timing or the specifics are off on almost every single one of them.

Go to Dan Luu's evaluation (https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/), search for "Appendix: detailed information on predictions". Seems like Kurzweil's has a huge number of awful predictions. This is from four years ago, so a few things are closer to being real now. But many things he predicted for the early 2000s still haven't arrived.

I think it is largely domain dependent. He's had solid predictions around computing, but for biology (and longevity) he seems to be way off.

For instance, by his prediction, we're already many years past a 100 year average life expectancy (with 120 years expected by the end of the decade).

I think his mistake was tightly coupling exponential compute with exponential progress in biology - which has so far not panned out.

> but because society rejected or didn’t adopt that technology

I would argue that society would likely have been glad to adopt, but the profit-seeking motive got in the way (again).