Other posters have noted that this isn't new at all. One could almost say that what's been predicted by futurologists over time is what Sci-Fi can see.
To me, what's interesting is the ways the lens of Sci-Fi can distort one's ideas. The flying car is the most classic, wrong science fiction prediction ever (even if it should come to pass). The way that the flying car fails is that ground motion doesn't translate directly into flying motion - flying transport has achieved some equivalence to ground motion but going from a "flying bus" (a conventional airplane) to a personal "flying car" turns out to be a vastly harder problem than going from a train to a car.
One might say, Sci-Fi involves extrapolation of experience, since the writer ultimately has describe the experiences of their characters. So what's missing overall, is "the dull parts", as least for "classic Sci-Fi", which has historically been adventure novels extrapolated into a new world (the novels of Robert Heinlein being the model).
Here, in a sense, dystopian and other novelist genres can give further insight a leg-up because they aren't constrained to make the future fun.
A really interesting story is EM Forrester's story "The Machine Stops", predicted many aspects of the Internet in 1909!
One of the most incongruous anachronisms I've read in sci-fi was in Asimov's Second Foundation, Arkady Darrell is introduced writing in a diary with a device that (IIRC) telepathically reads your mind and converts it to text. She starts daydreaming, and as a result her daydreams are transcribed into the diary. Then she has to start the entry over again because it's ruined.
It's ironic that 50,000 years in the future, when humanity is spread across the Galactic Empire, the future course of history can be predicted based on human psychology, and devices can mind-read to text, that they still hadn't invented word processing. As a kid reading it in the 90s, it was amazing that the main character would be seriously peeved off by something that was a solved problem to me.
I wouldn't consider it a mistake if Asimov predicted that by year 2000 we'd have flying cars or general AI. I don't see any clear argument available in 1950 about why this cannot happen.
However, not imagining that technology could fix mistakes in a document without discarding it, is a major blunder. I think if Asimov understood the world around him well and was good at analyzing how it evolves, he could have avoided it.
Sadly, I've seen many such mistakes in every sci-fi book I read; and given how little I know about the world, I probably see only a fraction of the mistakes that would be obvious to someone else.
Perhaps people who are good at thinking about the future rarely become sci-fi authors. Or perhaps I have been unlucky with my book selection -- if anyone can recommend a sci-fi novel where the world is well thought out, I'd be grateful.
In the Foundation series, at least the first books, people were smoking, using newspapers (as in physical paper) and coins; there are many things out of place in that universe.
As a teenager reading it in the mid-90s, I didn't find any of those all that incongruous. Back then there were still smoking sections in most fancy restaurants; I read the (physical paper) newspaper every morning; and my parents would frequently dig for loose change in their pocket at the supermarket cashier.
Asimov's way of writing was very typewriter-centric, so maybe it's not surprising that he in particular would fail to imagine word processor-like technology:
Second Foundation also came out in 1949, before the stored-program computer was invented. Computers at the time were room-sized electromechanical devices used for codebreaking or artillery calculations; there were no more than a dozen or so in the world, the general population was unaware of them, they couldn't be used interactively, there were no plans to use them for text (a typical diary entry wouldn't have fit into the EDSAC's memory anyway), and the idea that a computer could fit in your pocket and let you edit anywhere within a document probably seemed stranger than the idea of spaceflight.
Science fiction seems to resonate strongest when it introduces new ideas which are reachable. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash seems to be particularly influencial. Sticking some plot line in the future isn’t enough.
I miss those moments I had when I was younger, reading Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Diamond Age for the very first time. Certainly they all played a driving role in orienting me toward what I ended up spending my life doing. The stories and the characters mattered, but the technology drowned it out.
"It's ironic that 50,000 years in the future, when humanity is spread across the Galactic Empire,"
The chance for this is not very big. In fact, there is a good chance that we live more like savages on a very low technological level or don't exists at all anymore.
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make.
FTL is significantly harder than a rocket,creating worm holes are significantly harder that well a lot of things, teleportation, AI vs recognising cats in a photo and the list goes on. Nothing special about flying cars if anything it is more possible/closer
Re the ground motion, again I don’t understand planes do that.
I believe that is because the best Sci-Fi always struck a balance of being magical or whimsical, of course, but not being so farfetched that one couldn't imagine how they could be created. Imagine all the hobby scientific research done by scientists to determine if lightsabers were actually possible, or if warp speed could be obtained!
To me, what's interesting is the ways the lens of Sci-Fi can distort one's ideas. The flying car is the most classic, wrong science fiction prediction ever (even if it should come to pass). The way that the flying car fails is that ground motion doesn't translate directly into flying motion - flying transport has achieved some equivalence to ground motion but going from a "flying bus" (a conventional airplane) to a personal "flying car" turns out to be a vastly harder problem than going from a train to a car.
One might say, Sci-Fi involves extrapolation of experience, since the writer ultimately has describe the experiences of their characters. So what's missing overall, is "the dull parts", as least for "classic Sci-Fi", which has historically been adventure novels extrapolated into a new world (the novels of Robert Heinlein being the model).
Here, in a sense, dystopian and other novelist genres can give further insight a leg-up because they aren't constrained to make the future fun.
A really interesting story is EM Forrester's story "The Machine Stops", predicted many aspects of the Internet in 1909!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops