Predicting the future is difficult. Most people are quite bad at this.
This is easily demonstrated by taking a look at popular media which takes place in the future. Shows like The Jetsons showcase a world of flying cars and AI butlers, but no gay marriage. They’ve got food replicators and automated grooming machines, but no change from the nuclear family. Jane Jetson is a stay-at-home mom.
We’re notoriously bad at predicting social change. I’m sure part of the blame here lies with the audience for this media. Unisex bathrooms and trans characters probably wouldn’t play well to the 1960s American audience they were targeting. Still, the audience is at least partly to blame for the genre’s lack of predictive power. The fictional future felt comfortable rather than accurate.
I believe the disconnect is, as always, complexity. Social change is a far more complicated thing to predict. Most futurism comes from our primitive ability to project a graph outward.
We see a modern world of increasingly flat surfaces during the industrial revolution and assume the future is this, but more. We see personal transport take off and assume the future is this, but more.
The difficulty is in realizing that you cannot extend most graphs outward forever. A company growing 2x each year will see this number crumble as the market runs out of money. You hit the ceiling of some available resource eventually.
An analogous resource is appetite. The future is not going to be all flat surfaces because many people find this ugly. Demand going down is its own kind of correction.
Lots of political cartoons and curt caricatures exaggerate a reality or prediction of a modern problem as a way of getting at (to the author) an obvious truth. But this is often not obvious or true.
My money is on a realistic picture of the future looking more like Thor, where technology becomes somewhat magic-adjacent. We’ve not evolved long enough in our modern comforts to truly be comfortable with them. We still, as a species, crave grass. We still have higher sensitivity to green light.
Assuming we have the power to make it so, the future probably looks more appealing than a raw projection of a chart outward into the infinite.