A lot of people who don't read SF think it's full of whizzy new technology they can't understand. SF writers are themselves partly to blame for this perception. If the tech in a story isn't understandable to a certain degree then the story fails.
Arthur C. Clarke's Rendevous With Rama comes to mind here. Humans enter vast alien starship, explore for a while, meet some machines they don't dialogue with, and leave. The characters never find out who built the craft, or get to meet them. Or even find out anything useful about them. I remember thinking 'is that all?' when I'd finished reading it. The whizzy tech came at the expense of story.
Sometimes SF writers lose track of the fact that they're telling the reader a story. I'll often read extracts from SF short stories in magazines but I'm rarely tempted to buy the whole thing. Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I do get confused after the second jump-cut in half a page introducing a third character who isn't any better drawn than the half-sketches of the first two. And there seems to be quite a fashion for obscure stories with bizarre ideas that aren't properly worked-out right now.
Just because we're SF writers that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility of telling a damn good story. And if we've got a message to speak, telling a damn good story helps us to get that across without the danger of author preaching.
By all means use whizzy tech in your stories, but for the sake of your readers, provide a good enough explanation of it to allow them to grasp its significance in the story. If you can't do that then you haven't visualised it well enough and need to go back to the drawing board and do some more design.
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