I’d push back on the idea that our imagination is somehow stuck. Yes it is true that there is a thing called confirmation bias, but it is also true that a lot of what we call the future was imagined long before it existed—then built later.
Automatic doors, tablets, voice interfaces, video calls, even the idea of ubiquitous screens, portable computers, voice-controlled environments, and automated homes—those all showed up in science fiction decades before they were real. Roddenberry, Asimov, Clarke, and others literally imagined these things into a reality that someone later built.
We don’t stop imagining the future. We imagine it, then normalize it once it arrives. The problem isn’t that the future looks old—it’s that once something works, it stops feeling like the future at all.
