Many of his predictions boil down to "You know that weird fringe technology that's too expensive, bulky, and power consuming? In ten years, it'll be common place and cheap." After the fact they look like nothing.<p>But... despite over fifty years of this progression occurring in the electronics arena, the idea that what we have now is all we will ever have remains pervasive. Very few people have internalized the concept. And so he makes predictions, and they are not met with widespread apathy and people claiming they are trivial and obvious, they are met with disbelief and mockery from many people. So you can't say they are vacuously true from the vantage point of 2009. You need to have said it in 1998 when it was published, whereupon I assure you, you too would have been met with mockery and derision.<p>One example of where people are not thinking this way is in our discussions about the environment. The closest thing to innovation any mainstream debate discusses has to do with taking technologies that mostly work now but don't scale, and making them fail to scale marginally less, while assuming the same baseload of resource consumption will be in place. Yet technology marches ever onward, and one way it manifests is increased efficiency. A command of nanotechnology, even if it never quite reaches the dizzying heights described in the farthest-out singulatarian literature, will still have massive consequences for the efficiency of manufacturing, manufacturing of food resources, and numerous other issues as well. I find the idea of the Kyoto protocols utterly laughable, because built into the very concept is the idea that we can have meaningful discussions of what our resource consumption will look like in 50 years, an idea so absurd that it is remarkable that it passes without comment. What's the point of negotiating a binding treaty on a world that may literally be <i>growing</i> houses, just to take one incredibly small example?