It’s finally here – the year we’ve all been waiting for. Over the next 10 months we are going to see the most amazing technological advances since… well, probably since moving pictures and the talkies.

There will be flying cars and sleep-inducing alpha rhythm generators – new devices for making people think that what they’ve just experienced was all a dream.

Later this year the weather will be controlled and scheduled, the laces on shoes will be self-tying and clothes self-drying, and you won’t need to refuel your car yourself, because petrol stations will be fully automated.

Meanwhile, there will be robotic bins and tiny flying saucers to walk your dog.

This is also the year in which hologram movies will finally be released, and rather than having to wait around for the old technology of microwaves to slowly cook your food, like we did in 2014, it will be instantly prepared by a device called a hydrator, made by Black & Decker.

Unfortunately, fashion is set to take a turn for the worse, with silver sunglasses becoming all the rage, some men taking to wearing two ties at a time, and young people wearing their jeans inside-out. But look on the bright side – it will be better than their ridiculous idea of wearing their trousers low enough to show us their underpants.

The impending new invention that everybody seems to want most, however, is the hoverboard.

When it is unveiled, later this year, it will be just like a skateboard, only it won’t have wheels and it won’t need roads or pavements.

If you haven’t guessed yet, I’m talking about Back to the Future: Part II, surely one of the greatest movies ever made (after Back to the Future) – and even if it isn’t one of the greatest, then it’s certainly one of the most fun.

Made in the mid-1980s, it transports its heroes through time – to October 21, 2015.

So when our clocks struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, we suddenly found ourselves in the actual year that movie makers envisaged, all those years ago, and you could say we are just about to arrive in Back to the Future’s future.

Sadly, unless something radical happens in the next few months, we will have to accept that none of the film’s predictions came true, and that they failed to predict major technological advances that really did happen in the last 30 years. They almost foresaw the rise of the mobile phone with the film’s head-mounted versions, but the TVs in the diner were the old- fashioned tube type, instead of flat-screen, and the big screens at home were poor compared with HD. And there were no iPads or internet... they were still sending faxes!

All three Back to the Future movies are still giving us such fun, all these years in the future, but if we think about it too deeply it can be quite unsettling. It’s yet another indication of how quickly time is now passing, especially for those of us who are so old we can remember watching Back to the Future’s cinema release, buying the video, replacing it with a DVD, watching a hundred re-runs on telly and seeing it become available for download from iTunes.

Yet this experience is nothing new, because plenty of other fictional milestones have passed into history, from Nineteen Eighty-Four to Space 1999 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and hardly any of their details came true.

That’s the trouble with the future: it arrives faster than you can make it up.