He built the glider, incidentally, with a gift of $5 sent to him by an American Civil War veteran after a school essay he'd written about Robert E. Lee was published in the local paper. The war, after all, had ended only 44 years earlier.

In 1946, by which time he'd become a notable writer of science fiction, he published a story called 'A Logic named Joe', which described a global computer network with servers and terminals, that starts giving people the information that it thinks they ought to know as opposed to waiting for them to search for it - the Singularity, if you like, or maybe just Alexa. He also, as I recall, predicted reality TV somewhere.

And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter - my mother - wanted to work.

This isn't exactly an uncommon observation - lots of people have pointed out that vintage scifi has plenty of rocketships but all the pilots are men - 1950s society but with robots. Meanwhile, the interstellar liners have paper tickets, that you queue up to buy. With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things. (And, of course, we now have neither trolleys nor personal gliders.)

I was reminded of this photo recently when I came across a RAND 'long-range forecasting' study, from 1964. The authors polled a range of experts on what the key developments in coming decades would be and when they'd happen. Fields addressed included space flight and medicine, but the most interesting in this context is what was then called 'automation' (the past tended to describe as 'automatic' what we would now call 'computers'). The double-page spread below shows the conclusions (click to enlarge).