I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All t…
I think the hard part, as noted, is not necessarily the materialization of 'new tech', but very much how that tech plays with all the other new tech to produce a very new society. And in that you are exactly right, the most curious parts of that new society are not the technological tools themselves, but the social capabilities that spring from their convergence - the supermarket.
I work at the convergence of tech and synthetic biology, and a huge 'miss' many suffer is a blindness to just how powerfully the two technologies will interconnect in the near future - and not the tech as the product, but the capabilities of their convergence. It's not that computers, AI and all that jazz will become small and invisible, nor that genomics and biology will become easy, but actually what will occur at their intersection. It's that fun space mixed with both where things get really interesting.
And this is why reading sci-fi is fun for me. It allows an author to explore the clashes, implications and make prognostications on the outcomes of the convergence of multiple technologies with respect to relatable characters' choices in their lives.