These are clearly supposed to be funny. People in diving suits fishing for birds? The school where books are ground up and electrified into pupils' heads? A

These are clearly supposed to be funny. People in diving suits fishing for birds? The school where books are ground up and electrified into pupils' heads? A serious attempt to predict the future is a rare thing indeed, even on the part of science fiction writers, who are often more concerned with allegory and the exploration of ideas than with literally trying to figure out what the future will look like. For my money one of the best "future visions" is Spielberg's Minority Report. Not for "pre-crime", but for the suburbs that still look like suburbs, the personalized advertising (perhaps a little extreme), and the general normality of the cities (aside from the silly vertical freeways). The future looks a lot like now - because buildings last a long time, and the landscape changes even less than that.