If this quote is from September 1969... The movie 2001 was released in late spring 1968. In it the astronauts are using a color tablet computer laying on a table, no thicker than a modern iPad, to watch video.
Those working in the industry often know what's coming. What they often get wrong is how it's economically deployed, when it arrives, or what effects it will have.
That movie is very special. A lot of it’s predictions like flat LCD screens, personal IFE on airplanes, iPads, and kids messing around on FaceTime are so mundane now it’s easy to overlook them when watching the film with a 21st century set of eyes
Yet its central “prediction”: that human travel into space would progress forward at a comparable rate to what was accomplished in the early 60s, was wildly off.
As was pointed out in an earlier comment, 2001 really only got the economics of space travel wrong. It's possible that we could have done it, technologically speaking, but that it just would have been a huge waste of capital.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/did-st...