One of the odd things people do with tech is taking someone else's random projections at face value?

What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars", or "every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production"?

The people creating these narratives may a) truly believe it and tried to make it a reality, but failed b) never believed it at all, but failed anyway, c) or be somewhere else on this quadrant of belief vs actuality.

Why not just treat it as, "a prediction that went wrong". I suppose it's because a narrative of promise feels like a promise, and people don't like being lied to.

It's a strange narrative maneuver we keep doing with tech, which is more future-facing than most fields.