William Gibson famously observed that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. The flip side of that observation is that the near future is just like the present, with added nuggets of weirdness embedded in it. About 90% of the near future (10-20 years out) *is* here today: the buildings, the cars, the clothing. This is because we don’t junk our entire fleet of automobiles every time a new model appears — change is incremental, and old stuff hangs around. In addition to the 90% that’s familiar, there will be another 9% that is new but not unexpected — cheaper, flatter TV screens, better cancer treatments, bigger airliners, cars with extra cup-holders. These are the things that are trivially predictable. Finally, if you go more than 5 years out, about 1% of the world will be utterly, incomprehensibly alien and unexpected. To a time traveller from 1994 to 2004, that would have been the internet (which suddenly detonated, and went from being a techie/academic/corporate nerd thing into a ubiquitous communications medium), or mobile phones (expensive yuppie business tool to ubiquitous pocket lint).
Rule 34 and the shape of things to come – Charles Stross
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 