Sure, some sci-fi writers were openly disdainful about sci-fi as prophecy. Ursula Le Guin's famous "prediction is... not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying" foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness springs to mind. But some of them took their technology more seriously than others, and sometimes authors finding it easier to imagine a world a couple of decades away with space battles than one with ubiquitous mobile communication devices says things about their thought processes and the world they lived in beyond them simply needing characters to be uncontactable for the next event to happen.
And also, sometimes they were far more right about the details they threw in to be vaguely believable and less on the money about what they really cared about, like HG Wells' plot device for a world in which war was impossible which is believed to have been what inspired Szilard to create an actual atomic bomb (whilst the thrust of the book failed to convince enough of the right people of the merits of a World State). And Solution Unsatisfactory is uncannily closer still...
And also, sometimes they were far more right about the details they threw in to be vaguely believable and less on the money about what they really cared about, like HG Wells' plot device for a world in which war was impossible which is believed to have been what inspired Szilard to create an actual atomic bomb (whilst the thrust of the book failed to convince enough of the right people of the merits of a World State). And Solution Unsatisfactory is uncannily closer still...