So Karon and I are watching “Blade Runner” and talking about the central question of the movie: When does technology become so human-like that you’ve essentially created a human? And Karon comes up with perhaps the single best quote I’ve ever heard about science fiction: “It’s all technology until I see flying cars.”

For those of us who grew up on popular entertainment in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that’s probably the central question. Where in hell are the flying cars they promised us would be ubiquitous by this time?

Of course, for some flying cars would be a decidedly mixed blessing. For those of us with no sense of direction, for example, it would give us whole new ways to get lost. “Whaddaya mean, turn right and then go up 500 feet? I did and I still can’t find the place!”

Now, “Blade Runner” is a great movie, a classic even, for a lot of reasons. If you’ve never seen it, you really should. For one thing, every science fiction movie made since looks like it. And it really does pose some interesting philosophical questions, as well as questions that are interesting if you’re just a movie buff. For those of you who’ve seen it, I come down on the side of Harrison Ford’s character being a human rather than a replicant.

I’m not a huge science fiction fan, although I dabbled with it in my youth. Actually, I don’t read much fiction at all; you just can’t make up stories that are weirder than real life.

Still, one of the interesting things about living in the 21st Century is that life hasn’t really changed as much as the science fiction writers of the 19th and 20th centuries thought it would. As many problems as this world has, we aren’t really living in some dystopian, totalitarian state where just going outside your apartment (which is cluttered or sterile, depending on the storyteller) is an act of either courage or insanity. There are signs such a world may be approaching – climate change alone could make a lot of dire prophecies come true – but life is pretty livable, for most of the world for the most part. And we don’t wear a lot of spandex, thank the Lord.

On the other hand, there aren’t any flying cars.

Of course, why should we expect otherwise? Science fiction is, after all, fiction. Its authors claimed only to have imagination, not some mystical ability to foresee the future. It’s not their fault that the car companies fell down on the job.

That’s why the best science fiction, like “Blade Runner,” isn’t really about the future. It’s about questions of the human heart that go back to a time when technology consisted of finding a better way to build a fire.

The other thing about watching science fiction is what it doesn’t talk about. There’s some science fiction out there that predicted the Internet – which is proving to be the biggest change in human existence in my own lifetime, if not of all time – but I haven’t read anything that predicted how it would become such a part of the warp and woof of life.

The other day, our online connection was out for a few hours, along with our cable TV. It drove Karon nuts, because she’s a news junky and couldn’t find out what was going on in the world for a few hours. A few years ago, I would have gone out and bought her a newspaper, but in a time of instant news cycles it would have made as much sense that day to go out and buy her a book on medieval history.

When it comes to the Internet, familiarity and omnipresence have bred not contempt, but a kind of subtle dependency. When I was an undergraduate 30 years ago, if a professor wanted us to read something that wasn’t our textbook, he’d put it on reserve and we’d have to go to the reserve library to get it, which meant sitting in a horribly uncomfortable room under harsh lighting for a couple of hours and hoping you had time to finish the whole thing. Now, those readings are online; I fix myself a cup of coffee, go upstairs to my home office and sit in my bathrobe and do my assigned reading at whatever pace I can muster. That might seem like a small thing (it is), but when you do it repeatedly you discover it’s much more preferable, despite the threat of other distractions. I just have to tell myself to do the damned reading before I do any web-surfing.

But really, and I hate to sound like some Bizarro-world version of Andy Rooney, do you ever stop to think how amazing the Internet is? It’s not immune to Sturgeon’s Law, which is that 90 percent of everything is crap, but that other 10 percent carries with it virtually all of modern civilization. I’m constantly amazed at how it brings the world, both as a whole and as individual people, into your home.

People will be debating how much the Internet changed us for the rest of time. There will always be neo-Luddites who will say it will someday kill civilization. There will always be hucksters who will tout it all the while they’re trying to sell us things that don’t work or that we don’t need. There will always be optimists who will see it as the herald of some new golden age. All of those people will be both right and wrong. It will be what it is, for good or ill.

But whatever the Internet proves to be, I know one thing: Until I see a flying car, it’s all technology.