A future where all our devices, from our lamps to our ovens, are connected to the web has been a utopian prediction for years now.
They have taken note that, as Clinton said Thursday, these freedoms won't flourish on their own, despite techno-Utopian predictions to the contrary.
This is not to say that utopian and dystopian prediction has ceased - far from it; but the social changes now imagined for the future, or for societies that bear a strong resemblance to our own, are not remotely constructive.
Alejandro Vukotich, head of development for driver assistance systems at Audi, pointed out that predictions of utopian technological progress are notoriously unreliable.
One common wrong prediction, made by utopian socialists in the 19th Century, and cropping up in 1893 and 1931 and many times since, is the idea that mechanisation just has to go a bit further to earn us all a life of leisure.
The belief in precise prediction resembles a kind of utopian project, a tower of economic Babel.
Wells's literary career gives ample evidence of science fiction's latent radicalism, its affinity for aggressive satire and utopian political agendas, as well as its dire predictions of technological destruction.
In La Guerra del Fin del Mundo (The War of the End of the World), he used real events in late 19th-century Brazil to tell the story of the charismatic preacher Antônio Conselheiro, whose predictions of the end of the world and utopian visions set him and his followers against the government.
Predictions like these don't inspire great confidence in the utopian futures now being spun around stem-cell research or nanotechnology.
What if seemingly utopian prophecies like "peace on Earth, goodwill toward men" were regarded not as naïve pieties but rather as testable predictions of a state of social equilibrium toward which humankind was muddling?
