When we think of people predicting the future, we tend to think of flying cars, underwater cities and other outlandish things. However, what we don't think about is how far we have come already. While we are currently in the midst of a wave of "time-travelers" coming back to 2018 to tell us what the future looks like, we have to take everything they say with a pinch of salt.

Of course, the likelihood is that these people have not been to the future as it's not physically possible. However, there have been predictions about the future that are eerily true and this is one of them.

American science fiction writer David Gerrold predicted the future of computing back in 1999 and he was scarily accurate with his answer, causing his response to go viral on Twitter.

David predicted that eventually, we would have Personal Information Telecommunications Agents (PITA) which would organise our lives and be a method of communication - essentially, he predicted the smartphone.

"I've got a cell phone, a pocket organizer, a beeper, a calculator, a digital camera, a pocket tape recorder, a calculator, a digital camera, a pocket tape recorder, a music player and somewhere around here, I used to have a color television," said Gerrold.

"Sometime in the next few years, all of these devices are going to be meld into one. It will be a box less than an inch thick and smaller than a deck of cards."

He went on to talk about how the box will have "enough processing power and memory to function as a desktop system... Oh yes, and it will handle email, as well." Gerrold also predicted that the device would be able to connect to full-sized screens and would "have both speech recognition and speech synthesis. It will listen and respond to English or whatever language that you need, and yes, it will it will be a translator, too."

However, Gerrold's prediction did come with a warning, after saying that it would be called "Pita" for short, the writer said that "the acronym also can stand for Pain In The Ass, which it is equally likely to be, because having all that connectivity is going to destroy what's left of everyone's privacy."

Of course, Gerrold's final prediction is particularly poignant given the events that have gone on with Facebook over the past week or so. The company has seen its price plummet on the stock market after a serious breach of over 50 million users' data at the hands of Cambridge Analytica.

Understandably, given the nature of the prediction, Gerrold has gone viral on Twitter, with plenty of people expressing their astonishment at how accurate he was.

So, it turns out some predictions of the future do actually ring true - maybe we should take these time travelers a bit more seriously.

When we think of people predicting the future, we tend to think of flying cars, underwater cities and other outlandish things. However, what we don't think about is how far we have come already. While we are currently in the midst of a wave of "time-travelers" coming back to 2018 to tell us what the future looks like, we have to take everything they say with a pinch of salt.

Of course, the likelihood is that these people have not been to the future as it's not physically possible. However, there have been predictions about the future that are eerily true and this is one of them.

American science fiction writer David Gerrold predicted the future of computing back in 1999 and he was scarily accurate with his answer, causing his response to go viral on Twitter.

David predicted that eventually, we would have Personal Information Telecommunications Agents (PITA) which would organise our lives and be a method of communication - essentially, he predicted the smartphone.

"I've got a cell phone, a pocket organizer, a beeper, a calculator, a digital camera, a pocket tape recorder, a calculator, a digital camera, a pocket tape recorder, a music player and somewhere around here, I used to have a color television," said Gerrold.

"Sometime in the next few years, all of these devices are going to be meld into one. It will be a box less than an inch thick and smaller than a deck of cards."

He went on to talk about how the box will have "enough processing power and memory to function as a desktop system... Oh yes, and it will handle email, as well." Gerrold also predicted that the device would be able to connect to full-sized screens and would "have both speech recognition and speech synthesis. It will listen and respond to English or whatever language that you need, and yes, it will it will be a translator, too."

However, Gerrold's prediction did come with a warning, after saying that it would be called "Pita" for short, the writer said that "the acronym also can stand for Pain In The Ass, which it is equally likely to be, because having all that connectivity is going to destroy what's left of everyone's privacy."

Of course, Gerrold's final prediction is particularly poignant given the events that have gone on with Facebook over the past week or so. The company has seen its price plummet on the stock market after a serious breach of over 50 million users' data at the hands of Cambridge Analytica.

Understandably, given the nature of the prediction, Gerrold has gone viral on Twitter, with plenty of people expressing their astonishment at how accurate he was.

So, it turns out some predictions of the future do actually ring true - maybe we should take these time travelers a bit more seriously.