The Future

As a wee child my every spare thought was occupied by my wonder of the future. I used to sit in the closet for hours just thinking about how amazing things would be in the year 2005, WHOA! That's soooo far away! Though I'm older now and a slightly more disillusioned about the world, I now realize that "the future" will never come. Though I was very disappointed when 2001 finally rolled around and space travel hadn't become accessible to the common man and we hadn't colonized Mars, I'm glad things don't look the way they do in any sci-fi movie predicting the future. They are all hideous glimpses at what should never be.
I like to put sci-fi futuristic films into two stylistic categories...
The first and by far the worst is "the future according to whatever decade the movie was made". I.e. Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator 2 and Total Recall. Sure, they're entertaining movies but they all break rule #1 of predicting the future, never have the timeline of your film within the next 20 years. All the movies I listed above have already taken place in their ficticious universes and none of the things that take place in the film are even possible yet. Sure it's just a movie and it doesn't really matter but your best bet is to simply put the date it takes place in as "sometime in the ambiguous future" or "who knows" or better yet just put the date at some outrageously far time like 5385, but I think if you do that you risk being like 2001 space Odyssey and overestimating. I mean we had already moved past the "swanky" rat pack-esque martini-bar-in-every-house America by the time people got done watching it. "What do you want for your birthday darling?"
"A bush baby!"
"A bush baby!? You're insane. Well we'll just have to see about that, tell mumsy I called will you darling?"

The other vision of the future that I find much more plausible is the super-sterile future where no one smiles and everyone lives in a perfect politically correct bubble. I.e. The Matrix and Gattaca. With the advent of new technologies we rely less and less on other human beings, I absolutely love the new "do it yourself" lanes at Wal-Mart. I no longer have to deal with the perma-cranky cashiers anymore! It's great! But, eventually everything will be that way, robots will soon be taking my order at Taco Bell and I'll be joining the revolution to destroy the robots who have stolen my job. I predict by 3030 that nearly everything will become automated, putting millions of minimum wage employees out of business.
What's the point of this? I don't know but I just hope that we don't make the robots too angry, they can hurt us!