Prediction is hard, especially about the future. Yogi Berra

Nixon actually did say that China had a lot of potential and could really grow, given the strong work ethic and emphasis on education etc. (Too bad that its still an authoritarian state)

As a kid growing up in a communist country and then moving to the west, I never ever expected Russia and Communism to collapse but heck, even the best minds in the CIA and US intelligence failed to see it coming as it happened so quickly at the time.

Though in 1980 I read Alvin Toffler's the Third Wave and it was all about de-centralization including the break up of Russia, he even speculated the US might break up.

Growing up in the 70s and studying computer science in the 80s I remember even then debating with other computing science students (I said I want at least a megabyte of memory on my first computer - they were "what would you ever be doing that you would need that much memory) In 1985 the mainframe at our uni was being upgraded to 32mb of ram. I also recall hearing about a bank robbery that was reported to the police in our city (early 80s) while it happened - the thing is it was reported by something called a cellular telephone (the size of a briefcase costing $5000)

Now my smartphone has nearly 200gb of memory and even a 64gb usb stick is a few bucks.

But there's a lot of stuff that currently is being predicted that is all hyperbole, robots will take all our jobs etc, self driving cars (are still a long way away) I certainly don't buy the Ray Kurzweil bs.