"Hard tech" often only matures after several hype cycles. Sometimes cool tech demos can be produced a century or more beforehand. If you were in the 1980s and p

"Hard tech" often only matures after several hype cycles. Sometimes cool tech demos can be produced a century or more beforehand. If you were in the 1980s and people were talking about video calls being the next big thing, you might point out that people have been working on video calls since the 1930s[0], and it hasn't caught on in every one of the hype cycles that have followed, so that's an indication that it won't catch on in the future. Video calls have caught on now though - especially as they've reached mobile devices instead of requiring a literal booth in your house, as with AT&T's initial "Picturephone" tech in the 70s. I will say though that people tend to assume that each new technology will replace the preceding technology (text->audio->video->VR/light-field->...), but in fact it tends to end up just supplementing the existing tech. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony