The future, despite predictions, is still there

By 2007, some said we'd be trussed up in lycra just like Mr Sulu - sometimes we can be thankful that the world hasn't 'advanced' as quickly as commentators once thought.

I'm back in New York where just after midnight last night I arrived at my hotel and was checked into room 1408.
Stephen King fans will know the room number from the horror writer's short story 1408 which details the paranormal activity a writer experiences when he checks into a New York hotel.
Luckily I'm not in Stephen King's hotel, the Dolphin, which is supposed to be on 61st Street but only exists in his darkly inventive mind.
Thank God for that.
On the way through to New York I've been catching up with the latest technology publications - the likes of Wired and PC Today, a surprisingly good tech mag given away for free in airport lounges.
But one of the best feature series I've read in a while is Forbes series on the future, which is available in its entirety on the Forbes website.
I particularly liked Australian novelist Max Barry's farcical short story Springtide and Neil Steinberg's piece Dude, where's my videophone? about the video technology that's long been predicted by futurists and is even delivered by many mobile operators now, but just hasn't taken off.
The series, comprising both fiction and non-fiction is well worth a read and really examines the gap between the future we've been promised for decades (a Jetsons-type existence where everyone wears lycra Star Trek-type suits and lives in houses that look like they're modelled on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise) and what really has been delivered in the world of technology.