TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits with communicators, PADDs, and touch scree

TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits with communicators, PADDs, and touch screen controls, but generally designs are very much of their time. It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear chunky black leather. Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures. The background problem is that the 20th century was set up for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading to game changer developments like relativity and quantum theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident from attempts to find a theory of computability which eventually led to modern computing. These were all bedrock insights which completely changed what was possible in the physical world. Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory. Quantum Gravity might be the next game changer, but it also might not, and in any case it's an unknown distance away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking transformation.