What kind of syfy are you?

That's true of great sci-fi too, like the masterpiece 2001 referenced in your avatar. The great technological advancement of the late 90s early 2000s was the ability to slowly download images of naked people over your land-line. :D
Yet the internet was something that was never really thought of in sci-fi before it really took off.

I imagine most science fiction authors accept that when the time rolls around they'll be hopelessly out, the thing is not to be too short-termist, i.e. put it far enough in the future so that when it turns out wrong you won't be there to realise :) The real point (other than a bit of good space opera swashbuckling fun) is coming up with an idea and exploring the consequences of it.
 
Yet the internet was something that was never really thought of in sci-fi before it really took off.

I imagine most science fiction authors accept that when the time rolls around they'll be hopelessly out, the thing is not to be too short-termist, i.e. put it far enough in the future so that when it turns out wrong you won't be there to realise :) The real point (other than a bit of good space opera swashbuckling fun) is coming up with an idea and exploring the consequences of it.

Kind of, but I think Arthur C. Clarke was somewhat close. There was a publication by him for TIME LIFE that was something like "Man and Space" or "Humans and Space" that he wrote in 1972 and he imagined that thanks to satellites we could communicate with each other with small devices all across the world (Cellphones already existed, but they were far from being mainstream), theorizing that we could get news minutes after the events occurred. He even thought that could lead to some kind of direct democracy where all people from a country or even the world could be consulted in important matters and vote directly to pass or not certain law or action.

The last part has not happened and he was very interested in the prospect, but the rest was very close to the smartphone world that we have today.
 
As a vision for something other then Earth likes
terraformable worlds before the process is complete
I suggest the Suits episode of the series Love Death and Robots.
 
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