Lang wasn’t saying, “This is the future,” but rather, “we need to beware of a future that bends this way.” And he was right. The mechanizations that were meant, as Wells says, to liberate us didn’t entirely. We’re no longer marching shoulder to shoulder to the caves to work mechanically, but half of us go to low paid jobs that are not somehow more human than what he depicted. An Amazon or Uber driver may not look like a fleshy cog in an oversized machine but he or she might certainly feel that way.
Lang was sitting us down as children and telling us a fable and the fable had a moral: in the future we need to take care lest we the humans are reduced to machinery and the machinery sublimated to human. And Lang was prescient because, 100 years later, that is what we’ve found.