We may not have flying cars, and a ton of other shit that people thought we would have now, but Arthur C. Clarke fucking nailed it with this. It’s downright eerie how accurate everything he’s saying is, right down to the concerns about how it will impact social interaction, and the ability of business people to work from anywhere in the world.
More impressive if you predict things before they happen. Desktop computers started selling in 1973. The IANA was established in 1972.
(plus, while they exist, how many of us really have jobs where we live anywhere we want and telecommute in as Clarke predicts?)
… I do. 
In Childhoods end he describes things that sound an awful lot like PDA’s. They even can sync data via infrared. I always thought that was pretty impressive given that book was written in the 50’s. There is even some illusion to something you could interpret as being virtual reality.
Oddly enough, Clarke failed to predict the impact the internet would have on the distribution of child pornography. Considering.
Actually, he came close. He wrote a story in which some enemy (the Soviets?) broadcast porn to the US via satellite, the idea being that that sort of thing would eventually bring about the moral destruction of society. Can’t remember the name of the story.
The Russians are Cumming?
“I Remember Babylon” – the insidious scheme was actually described as a combination of moral rot and cleverly insinuated propaganda.
I recall that later (after video pr0n, with or without Commie Rat overtones, became easily available to anybody in the developed world who cared to watch it) he described the story as “quaint”.
And the Chinese did it. It was first published in Playboy, btw.
Was it that he predicted it or did he sow the seeds for it? Did his concept he distributed widely through his storys enter the minds of people to eventually create those things?
And
How big a factor is science fiction in inspiring new inventions?
I recently re-read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy for the first time in maybe 30 years. I got a big laugh out of this scene in Second Foundation where 14-year-old Arkady Darrell is using her new voice transcriber to compose an essay for a school assignment. The device is transcribing her words to paper as she speaks them:
“… Hari Seldon — foresaw the end. Through the science of psychohistory, the intrissacies of whose mathematics has long since been forgotten,
(She paused in a trifle of doubt. She was sure that “intricacies” was pronounced with soft c’s but the spelling didn’t look right. Oh, well, the machine couldn’t very well be wrong —)
he and the men who worked with him…”
I read that and thought, “Holy crap, Asimov basically predicted computer spell-checking, and the resulting mistakes, right there! In 1953!”
I just finished re-reading Asimov’s later Foundation stuff, including “Forward the Foundation”, published in 1992. And I keep suffering severe disconnect, in that he wasn’t forseeing electronic books, iPods, cell phones, or the internet. Info was all stored at the “galactic library” in Trantor, and you went there and asked the librarians to get it for you.
Sad to say, what he wrote shortly before he died wasn’t real good… 
Well to be fair I thought the lack of miniaturization and personal sized technology was a symptom of Trantor’s ills as much as anything, and the advanced gadgetry to the First Foundation was a sign of it’s excellence.
Computer networks and the like got predicted long before Clarke, Forster’s The Machine Stops is kind of an example, and people will be referring to Murray Leinster any second. Geosynchronous communications satellites are a better example, but that was a paper not a story.
As for inspiring inventions - there are so many inventions it is unlikely that any story has ever inspired anything directly, though it might give a name to an invention. SF might be better at inspiring people to go into science, it did it for me.
That, and still using nuclear weapons 50,000 years in the future. Of course, in the 1950s “atomic power” was still the hot new thing, so no surprise it was used in science fiction.