This can give us some tricky problems in deciding how much detail of the tech and society to put into our story. To be convincing, we have to describe future tech sufficiently that the reader believes it, but not so much that we're info-dumping details for the benefit of our readers.
Imagine that you lived 200 years ago and somehow you'd just seen a TV programme. The tech there would seem magic to you. How could a box capture likenesses of people? And how could it make those pictures move? To that person of the past, TV would seem like magic. They'd probably spend hours watching the images, marvelling at them and wondering how they were made.
But to us, TV is an everyday bit of tech. We watch the programmes on it, not thinking about the technology that brings them to us. It's an ordinary object in our lives.
This is the sort of impression we have to convey in SF that deals with future periods. Tech we use every day is utterly familiar to us, and the tech of the future will be completely familiar to the people of the future too.
So how much detail do we put into our stories about future tech? If it is something totally unfamiliar to us today we will have to add some description of how it works and what it does for the benefit of our readers. But unless we're writing about a radical new invention, the tech will be utterly familiar to the people of that time and they won't go around describing it in detail.
We need enough detail to tell the reader what the stuff does, while making it seem totally familiar to the people of its time. Put in too much detail, and we risk throwing the reader out of the narrative. Put in too little description, and we risk confusing or annoying our reader. It's a tricky balance to get right, but it's one we must tackle every time we write about future tech.
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