Why is it that every single mid-20th century vision of 21st century life includes some version of the video phone?  I mean when you think about it, it's kind of a useless device except in certain specific circumstances.  When someone is talking to you, the picture of their face only gives so much information -- it's why documentary filmmakers avoid lingering for too long on talking heads -- there are other, more important things to be looking at.

This 1968 Mechanix Illustrated article predicts a "TV phone" in 2008 as well as a slew of other silly-sounding advances (plastic roads?).  What's fascinating though are the ways they get some things mostly right, but miss a key component.  The video phone is a good example.  Yes, video phones exist now (or things that do the exact same thing, anyway) but 20th century prognosticators completely missed taking the next step -- how they would be used.  The usefulness of a pocket-sized video camera is not in 2-way communication, but in broadcasting.  It's a tiny leap, technologically, from video phone to video blogging, but nobody predicted the ubiquity of the internet or the subsequent social networking explosion.

Similarly, the 1968 article envisions, rather accurately, laptop computers and instant, wireless graphical communication...

Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

So attache case = laptop, pencil-thin infrared flashlight = optical mouse.  Good so far.  The author even got the printer mostly right.  But reading between the lines, it sounds like the printed "fixed copy" is what performs the "save" function in the process.  The prediction didn't take digital files into account.  Had the author drawn a diagram of the office of the future, there would no doubt have been rows of filing cabinets lining the walls for all of the fixed copies of documents.

The lesson for futurists is that extrapolating advances based upon current technology and social trends is easy, but taking the next step -- how those new technologies will change social trends -- is much, much more difficult.