Actually I mentioned flying cars due to fuel inefficiency (I automatically assumed it was too low to make them practical) but I neglected to actually check their energy usage, and now that I just did it seems like the maximum efficiency could be on par with a normal car and it would depend on the actual trip, so my mistake on that.
A better example might be artificial intelligence and the AI winters. Like the failure of machine translation despite high hopes in the 1960s. It took us some 50 years to get to where we are now with Google Translate, and it still only works well for some languages. I have no idea how close to human accuracy it will get, so I would neither be surprised if it never does, nor if it does someday.
Anyway, hopefully instead of picking on the particular examples you can see that my point is obviously that people imagined we'd have a lot of things now that we still don't have the technology for today. So the fact that we've done amazing things in certain areas doesn't really say anything regarding this particular issue.
A better example might be artificial intelligence and the AI winters. Like the failure of machine translation despite high hopes in the 1960s. It took us some 50 years to get to where we are now with Google Translate, and it still only works well for some languages. I have no idea how close to human accuracy it will get, so I would neither be surprised if it never does, nor if it does someday.
Anyway, hopefully instead of picking on the particular examples you can see that my point is obviously that people imagined we'd have a lot of things now that we still don't have the technology for today. So the fact that we've done amazing things in certain areas doesn't really say anything regarding this particular issue.